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Geek Culture / Lost all my data on one disk. Any idea what to do now?

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Lukas W
21
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Joined: 5th Sep 2003
Location: Sweden
Posted: 17th Oct 2007 05:10
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Hi,
On my computer I have three hard drives where the third hard drive is divided up in three partitions.
One Partition I use for DBPro related projects and stuff, another is used for downloads (as in useful applications, like Brushes for photoshop, free version of treemagik v1 (which is impossible to find nowadays)), and the third is where I install all games.

I wanted to combine these three partitions into one, this way I save some disk space, as I was beginning to run out.

As I had never "merged" partitions before, I was not sure how it was done, so I moved all data from partition 1 (DBPro stuff) to partition 3 (games).
Then I opened PartitionMagic and selected to merge the two disks.
After a while it started defragmenting (it said "indexing files").
About two hours into it, I got an error message (which I forgot), and then Partition 3 (games and now all my dbpro related stuff) was gone. And I mean GONE, as in unallocated space.
Partition 2 is not found by windows, but is found by PartitionMagic, so I guess a restart will solve this.
Partition 1, where I originally stored my dbpro related stuff is fine and readable. And now I regret Moving the files instead of just copying them.

I am wondering if anyone here knows what I can do to replicate the partition? Games files are not important. What IS important is all of my DBP related projects and stuff.

I downloaded "GetDataBack for NTFS" and it is currently scanning the now unallocated space partition. Two hours is remaining.
Has anyone ever tried this application? Does it work?

If I will not be able to restore my data, I think I'm up for a very long break away from programming. I'll instead draw more (or live a more social life again).

I understand that this is all my fault, and I could have avoided this by decide not to merge the partitions. But what's done is done.

Thanks for your time.

I allways afraided from a clowns. aww..
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Agent Dink
20
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Joined: 30th Mar 2004
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Posted: 17th Oct 2007 06:10
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Ouch, sorry to hear that man. Good luck getting the data back. However, I could ask why didn't you back up precious documents first? It's always wise to do that before doing anything hardware related to your computer because there is always the chance something will go wrong.

I did something similar once though. Lost a good month or so of work. I was very very angry at myself for being so dumb :\ You'll get over it in a few months though once you start recoding everything and realize how much better the code is coming out the second time around.

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Arkheii
21
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Joined: 15th Jun 2003
Location: QC, Philippines
Posted: 17th Oct 2007 07:30
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I've used that before to rescue 80GB of data from a SATA drive. It works, depending on what went wrong.

But a second time, the drive just died and wouldn't rev anymore. I sent the drive for RMA and it came back labelled as "refurbished," so I thought I'd have a chance at rescuing data. Turns out that they totally replaced the drive and the scan found nothing.

In other words, I managed to rescue the data only to lose it again I should've burned everything to DVD-R discs...

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Dazzag
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Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Cyprus
Posted: 17th Oct 2007 09:37 Edited at: 17th Oct 2007 09:38
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Quote: "I should've burned everything to DVD-R discs"
Ouch. Personally I find most of the important stuff shouldn't get above 100gb, and considering 500gb external hard drives are cheap as chips then is much better. Seriously doubtful if both your internal and external drives will fail at the same time.

For my really important stuff though then I get mega paranoid. I must backup to about 7 different flash based drives (this includes 2 phones and iPod to make sure I always have a copy on me) at the end of every day. Only takes 5 minutes, but is well worth it if you ask me. Then once a week I update a DVD-RW disc. One a month I update a DVD-R disc and shove it in a fireproof safe.

At the end of the day storage is so cheap these days it doesn't make sense not to. Of course it normally takes only one time to learn that lesson the hard way (I still have ST disks from 1989 that still work FFS!)

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
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hessiess
17
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Joined: 30th Mar 2007
Location: pc!
Posted: 17th Oct 2007 09:44
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take the drive to a data recovery spetialist, and DO NOT use it. the data will most lickly still be on the disc! wen you delete somthing id dus not delete it, it just removes the pointers to the disc locations

learn blender, you will never regret it.

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Lukas W
21
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Joined: 5th Sep 2003
Location: Sweden
Posted: 17th Oct 2007 12:16
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It seems the files I could recover are compressed and unreadable, which sucks.

I allways afraided from a clowns. aww..
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GatorHex
19
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Joined: 5th Apr 2005
Location: Gunchester, UK
Posted: 18th Oct 2007 15:13 Edited at: 18th Oct 2007 15:14
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Yeah FAT32 is so much easier to recover

I've had plenty of dead memory cards and even though they won't format you can get the data off them easy.

NTFS though seems to encrypt the files somehow which make recovery damn hard in such situations.

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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bitJericho
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Joined: 9th Oct 2002
Location: United States
Posted: 19th Oct 2007 18:11
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Quote: "take the drive to a data recovery spetialist,"


You're talking about hundreds of dollars to do such a thing.


The greatest multiplayer text adventure ever...
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VR2
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Posted: 21st Oct 2007 03:53
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Try this?

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
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Keo C
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Joined: 3rd Aug 2007
Location: Somewhere between here and there.
Posted: 21st Oct 2007 05:22
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Quote: "Any idea what to do now?"

I would cry, then I would try to recover my files..

Uhhhhhhh.... I forgot
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demons breath
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Location: Surrey, UK
Posted: 21st Oct 2007 14:45
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Thanks for the helpful input Keo C. I bet he's kicking himself that he never even thought of trying to recover his files.

http://jamesmason01.googlepages.com/index.htm
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