Hello everyone,

I'm sad to report that today, my hard disk miserably failed, taking all my data with it. For the past 10 hours I've been trying to restore my data, I went to the store to buy a new big hard drive for data recovery (that's from a temporary Windows installation that I'm writting this message) and I still don't know how much data I won't be able to save.

Don't worry, the source code of Messenger Plus! is safely backed up, however, I may lose many files that are the result of months of work (I can't backup 80Gb of file on my Tape Backup, however, you can be assured that from now on, I'll use my new 250Gb drive to do full backups). I don't know how a new drive like mine can get messed up so quickly and easily but in any case, I still got many hours to put to try to recover a maximum of stuff. Messenger Plus! 3 will probably get delayed because of that event, even if I'll try my best to get back some of the time lossed due to this problem.

I'm now going back to my numerous file restore programs, have fun while I'm away.
Patchou

Damn it that really sucks
i hope u dont lose too many files patch and do ur best to recover them

Patchou, i know how it feels to lose alot of work.. however just try to stick to it and keep developing..

The whole community is behind you

.. damn .. that realy has to suck.. there is a program that can view deleted files and stuff on hard drives and recover them (if they havent been writen over), but i duno the name of it sorry.. but there is a program out there that cna do it!

best of luck anyway

* martin slaps fault hard drive around a bit with a large trout.
good thing u had it all backed up

damn..... that really sucks (as Chromo said)

hope the recovery thing gets some important data and you don't loose important things

and it's good to hear that the source code of Messenger Plus! is safely backed up

I'm behind you aswell....

I know how it feels when you loose Mega/Gigabytes of data. Happend to me also a couple of times. It's a very hard lesson to learn... When it happend, I stared to my comp for 30 minutes like a zombie. Then I was realy (and I mean realy) pissed. After that I begon the painstaking low-level data recovery, both manualy (fat tables, partitition tables and dir structures where *beeped* up like hell) as using some powerfull tools....
It took me some weeks, after that I recovered 60% of my data and viewed every byte of my HD.... I will never forget it...

Anyways, good luck....

Thank you for your so fast support. It's just sooooo long before I'm able to see a result. I had 183,000 files on my disk and I can't be sure of the vailidity of any of them, even if they have been restored. As I already experienced something like that 5 years ago, I'm doing backups for the important data (source code, emails, documents, ...) but there are stuff like pictures, personal video files, work-in-progress, downloaded tools etc that are not on backup. But as I said, I know paid a heavy price for a new big HD (I didn't even knew they were making 250GB hard drives before I got to tyhe store and asked "quick! what's the biggest disk you've got?"). As it seems I won't be able to completely restore my system, I'll have to reinstall everything, that's tiem consuming, it's boring, and I already did it a month ago when I got my new computer. Even worse: before I can do that, I'll have to get a replacement disk from AlienWare.

Ok, I'll stop whining about it. I just hope it's not the result of a virus.
Patch

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Originally posted by Patchou
personal video files

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quote:

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Originally posted by Chris Boulton
Maybe this means you can play Final Fantasy or something while your programs reinstall?

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Hmm

btw don't EVER use IBM hard discs
I had 5 is a time frame of 12 months (yeah I know)
I didn't overclock them they just stopped working, I heard iron over Iron when they crashed

But I create a backup on the server and on several dvd's, because if I loose to much I'm f*cked.

p.s. My dad never back-ups

I agree with Huuf. I had 4 IBM disks in 11 months . I didn't lose important data, but installing everything again and again still sucks .

Good luck, Patchou!

erm patchou aleinware sells 500 gig'ers and i'm surprised that a drive sold to you by them failed. you can probably get it replcaed with any good wuality drive


(7 years no backups )

GL patchou, I hope Everything goes ok

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Originally posted by lizard.boy
(7 years no backups )

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I had my harddisk in this comp 5 years and it's never crashed yet (touch wood)


Good luck Patchou cant you take the disk to some data recovery place as crashed harddrives data can be recovered maybes it's worth paying to get the data back

We're all behind you Patchou if you ever think different close your eyes and you'll here a gentle chant of over 4 million people shouting your name

No Patchou!!!

That really sucks...I want to see the new features really bad...

it's ok, my system is back on a temporary disk while the new one gets exchanged (that's in this kind of moment that you're happy to earn some money with a sponsor, because big hard disks are not particularly cheap ).

Patchou rotten luck to have your hard drive fail anyways , i found a program that you can take a look at  its used to read and recover failed hard drives its called NTRecover and heres address for it http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml     i hope it helps

na, NTRecover is not good enough. I used R-Studio and it did more than I expected

so u got alot of it back?!!?!



hooray

Well, it took a lot of time, a lot of tries and a brand new 250Gb hard disk but yes, I got everything I wanted back. However, Windows really suffered and I'll have to reinstall it from scratch soon (which sucks because I already installed everything just one month ago).

Well it's good you didn't lose too much...I've had hard disk crashes like twice b4, but my HD was fine after a re-installation of windows...I was one of the first to get blaster...b4 the virus definition was out...I really have no clue how I got it ...anyways, best of luck!

just wanna say patchou thanks for taking the time to do all of this for us.  I"m sorry to hear  about your hard drive, but its good that you got most of it back..  keep up the great work

Pc's can be evil things. My old one used to get something every year I think, and it would end up being sent away to my dad's m8 who would patch it up nd it would come back. Its happened too many times though, and there's been hard disk failiures etc.

Good that you have recovered everything and installing windows shouldn't be that bad, man I could kill for a 500gb disk...

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Originally posted by Patchou
na, NTRecover is not good enough. I used R-Studio and it did more than I expected

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