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I have a computer that has tax information. Yeah no back up, my bad!
The drive was having problems loading XP, according to some quick net searches, run recovery console was the general fix. I ran XP recovery, fixboot, fixmbr and chkdsk. The uitilies said yes there were problems and "I fixed" them. Well now the drive reports as a 9 meg hd not the 80 gb that it is and there are several filexxx.chk on it. Does anyone have a software solution that I might investigate to fix this problem. The $975 quote from a drive recovery service was a little more than I wanted to spend.

Looking forward to endless hours of re-entering the tax information or paying for drive recovery and no christmas gifts. Can't decide which...

Brian

Assuming you have access to a computer that can both download off the internet as well as burn CDs and has Nero or something similar installed, you could go here and download a disk image of a linuxliveCD with recovery tools built in, then use it to recover and move the data to a floppy or something before reformatting? Dunno if this helps any, but...

Take out the drive and slave it in a working computer and see if can read any data on it. If so, copy data to other drive. If not, try using a data recovery software app to salvage wanted data.

FREE:
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/syste ... overy.html
SHAREWARE:
http://www.snapfiles.com/shareware/syst ... overy.html

Worst case is everything unrecoverable or possibly can reciover text data that can be saved and then copy+pasted into new tax files.

I've seen the 80 to 9 gig problem before. I pulled my drive out, slaved it in another PC. I ran Partition Magic on the slave and was good to go. I think it was ver 8.0 for up to 80 gig drives, use better then 8.0 if bigger then 80 gig.

One Sick Tzim wrote:... and download a disk image of a linuxliveCD with recovery tools built in, but...

Could not find anything other than LinuxLive CD-ROUTER, I tried it but then my Linux text command skills are about the same as my brain surgery skills... Not gonna happen.

TonyT wrote:Take out the drive and slave it in a working computer and see if can read any data on it. If so, copy data to other drive. If not, try using a data recovery software app to salvage wanted data.

FREE:
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/syste ... overy.html
SHAREWARE:
http://www.snapfiles.com/shareware/syst ... overy.html

Worst case is everything unrecoverable or possibly can reciover text data that can be saved and then copy+pasted into new tax files.

THANKS for this... I used the GetBackData from the shareware link. AWESOME tool.... I am still thinking I need to send them some money. But when I called the computer owner, she said "Oh I went ahead and rebuilt the files from scratch cause I didn't think you were able to do anything., Thanks anyhow" so I didn't recover the file.
I would highly recommend anyone having drive troubles to use this application.

I was just going to recommend GetDataBack for NTFS/FAT. I used it and recovered ALL of my files from a crap Maxtor external drive that had over 10GB of family photos on it. It was the best $80 I have ever spent.



Glad you got things worked out. Enjoy your Christmas!