Reformatted... lost everything...
 

I had to reformat yesterday and I lost EVERYTHING! thousands of games, several sites I was working on (one for MONTHS that I was just about to publish), 6 gigs of mp3s and so many just random hard to come by things. This sucks.

Wow, that really really sucks. Sorry :(

Reminds me of the great hard drive crash of 2000.... 75gb of MP3s lost. I still haven't recovered. I'm at about 70% 3 years later. My early win98 days of reformatting every so often taught me this: keep your operating system and your precious files on separate drives.

My CD-R drive has crapped out. I've been slowly adding files to CD's with a friends external driver. I have to send the computer to HP to have it fixed, and I don't trust them not to whipe everything off my computer.

I recently had a major OS failure and lost a lot. It sucks, but this is why it's important to backup.

*spec bangs his head against the wall for not doing that

How do I backup? I only have one hard drive.

Sorry to hear this.
Must be terribly frustrating/upsetting.

CD-R, Zip drive, whatever you can find.

Unfortunately, it sounds like it's a little late for that.

Don't have a CD-R drive?

You could buy an external one.

I'm not very computer savy, you probably shouldnt take advice from me :crazy:

you can partition that one drive into many drives.

back in the win9x days, u could use the dos command fdisk before installin an OS. i'm not sure wht to do with NTFS.

also, 3rd party programs like partition magic work great with ntfs.

CDR drives are so cheap nowadays (under 80 bucks Canuck, so about a buck fifty US I would imagine) that there is very little excuse not to get one. It's a cheap way to back stuff up.

I use a 20 gig DAT on my machine, however. Much more convenient.

That really sucks, man. I've had to reformat a few times, and I don't have any way of backing things up other than a floppy drive.

I just make sure I don't really have anything that important on my computer. Sure, I have music, but half of it I don't really listen to that much, and if I felt the urge to listen to something, I can just download it again if I don't already have the CD. Games? I rarely play anything not online anymore, so it's not much of an issue, and if I do lose some saved games, its not the end of the world. I probably should back up the stuff I've written for school, but even if I lose that, I probably still have the hard copies floating around somewhere.

If you do usually store stuff on your computer that is really that important, it probably is a good idea to invest in a CDR drive or a ZIP drive. At this point, you could probably get one for under $50, and it's probably worth it just to ease your mind.

sorry to hear of your loss. Two weeks ago my 60 gig hard drive completely physically failed. oof... So, I feel your pain bro.

Amazingly it was murphy's law in action as I'd purchased a gob of CD-R's to back up my drive. ah well.

I bought BackUpMyPC, becuase my older PC has a history of crashing. And the software didn't work. Go figure, I guess its back to CD-R's.

Best solution, my prefered solution i should say. Get a second physical drive (slave), save ALL data to it, keep your OS on the main drive(primary).

I have had the same data on a slave drive for years, i can reformat the sys drive if i need to, no loss of data. This isnt to say backing up to a removable media isnt a good option, but im to lazy to do this often.

You had several other options

a) partitioning
b) buy a new drive, install OS to that drive, chain your first drive with the bad OS install on it as a slave drive to the new drive, access your files - copy them over or leave them there.
c) CD-Rom backup copies of files - Most of my MP3 files are of CD's I own so if I lose them, I've just lost the time it takes to re-rip them. Most of the MP3's are on CD-Rs too, every now and then I burn a new bunch of MP3s to CD-R.

You didn't HAVE to lose those files, you could have chained your drive onto a friends system who has a CD burner and burned off what you wanted (the cheap option)

What really sucks is when your hard drive starts making a grinding noise or refuses to spin up at all (FU MAXTOR!), or when you take your HD out to put it in a new computer and drop the damn thing and it starts making a magical jingley noise.

I keep 2 hard drives in my computers and back up critical files to each other when i reformat.

what was the reason for the reformat?

Learned that the hard way myself.


The three most important rules in computing are:


(Say them with me, folks)


Backup

Backup

Backup

Partition, my friend. Put your OS on a small partition, along with you program files. Put everything else on another partition(s). That way if you reformat, you only reformat over the OS partition.

'Course, you'll need Partition Magic, or something similar.

Oh, I have CD-R but it's kinda impracticle to keep like 8 gigs of music and at least 4 other gigs of stuff on them. I'm going to college in a few days so I guess it doesn't matter too much (the computer stays here).

8GB = what 10-11 CD's

vs

loosing everything

which is more impractical? :)

and most importantly, which are you going to do next time?

Partitioning is a good way to keep the OS and data seperate, but I still agree with Halx and suggest keeping them on two seperate drives.

If your drive fails you lose BOTH PARTITIONS!! Trust me, I've learned this from experience.

Setting up an old PC to run as a server will also work.

Whichever way you go, keep your data on a seperate form of media. Another hard drive, CDRW, ZIP, Network or even DVD.

This happened to me and my friend about a month ago. Both of our computers died. They didn't really <i>crash</i> (in that sense), but they 'died' and killed all of our movies, mp3's, pictures, webpages, memories, logs, homework, documents, etc.

The only thing we could do is not think about it. Act like it never happened. Fortunately my friend had alot of his 'cooler' appz on cd. I, on the other hand, don't back anything up (i thought I was hardcore).

Did you lose everything before!! I'm a little confused becuase re-formatting a drive will wipe everything off of it... thats what its supposed to do.

If not... why did you re-format? Just wondering?

I partitioned my one hdd. I put all my precious stuff on one, and the OS and applications on another. That way when I wipe the OS drive, I can keep my valueable mp3s.

I use Norton Ghost. Great program. It has good compression, also.

after losing my mp3s once, I decided to burn the ones I get from now on. I have 51 data cds of mp3s now. I burnt around 33 of those in one sitting, too. it's DEFINITELY worth it. I also advice getting a small hard drive (10 GB-20GB) and installing your OS on it, and then putting your mp3s on a different drive.

I copy my boot partition (C:) to the end of the same disk and onto another hard drive once a month - just in case I stuff something up.

Partition Partition Partition Partition. I once lost 120 Gigs of stuff from complete harddrive failure though, i was very very very angry, so i bought a small 10 gig hardrive and threw windows on that.

I can't agree more with backing up your data. I make a backup copy of my essential files every few weeks. I have it reduced to less than 100 megs of data.

My bookmarks, my IE data (inbox, sent items), a few text files and my outlook express address book.

i keep a copy on another harddrive, and i usually burn it off onto a CDRW every month or so.

i also have about 8 gigs of stuff in My Documents that i just shift over to another harddrive before i format, then move it back, but the essentials are taken care of incase of hard disk failure.


and keep in mind, when harddrives fail, it is recoverable. the first thing most people do is format and reinstall their operating system.... no no no.


after a harddrive fails, the step by step guide.

step 1 - reboot your computer twice, just incase.

step 2 - relax. no panic attacks please.

step 3 - find another disk, test your IDE cable and IDE controller, and if it is the disk that's faulty, install windows on the new (or borrowed) disk, and try to access the old harddrive through that.

step 4 is far too lengthy to go into here, because there's a plethora of things that could happen. just remember that harddrives DO fail. they aren't the most reliable thing in the world, don't be taken off guard by one that flips out.

Well we've had a lot of problems with hackers and such and the other day the computer went haywire (the day norton expired) and it was impossible to do anything. My brother tried everything but it was useless.

I nearly lost everything during a Scandisk when my system failed. I went out and bought a second WD 60GB hard drive and used OnTrack Data Recovery to recover everything off the failed drive. Then I reformatted it and now I use it as a backup drive with PowerQuest DriveImage 2002. I also have a 40GB drive to quickly backup all my MP3s, pictures, videos and some other stuff. Pretty soon I'm going to re-do everything and put my OS and programs on the 40GB, then all my files on one of the 60GB drives, and back it up on the other 60GB drive. Plus I'll have an 80GB drive in there just for the hell of it. On top of that, my website, music, pictures, set-up files, etc. are all on disc just in case.

No matter what you'll always lose something.......nothing says backup like ghosting.....I've lost many upon many files from porn to school docs.........

Look into RAID mirroring. Most modern motherboards have RAID controllers built in.

You can set it up to write data to two separate hard drives at once. If one dies, the other is left in tact.

At the risk of getting flamed into oblivion, try any version of Linux (personal preference: Debian). First off, it's likely you won't have the type of problem that caused you to have to re-format. Secondly, when you setup your partitions at installation, you can arrange hem so , even if you have to re-install, you won't have to format the whole drive, just he Root patition; if the files you want to save aren't on the Root partition, you just mount the partition they ARE on when you're re-install is done. Also, if you have an H.D failure, you really SHOULD have backed up to CD-R, because it doesn't matter which OS you've got, a dead drive is a dead drive.

I feel you. Although the my degree of loss wasn't as high as yours. I still lost everything I accumulated for the last 3 years. As of now, I have nothing.