Hard-Drive Crashed...Help!
We had our hard-drive crash yesterday. We couldn't get past the Windows XP in safe mode or any other way. Computer techs couldn't retrieve anything and I have the last 2 years of my mother's life in many photographs I didn't backup. She passed away on Easter. Does anyone no if its possible to retrieve photo's etc that won't cost an arm and a leg? Thanks for any help. dlkett59@yahoo.com:rolleyes:
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Download: HERE
TestDisk can scan for and recover files on your hard drive unless the HDD has mechanically failed; if it has not mechanically fail, it can also attempt to replace the file tables for you so the disk is restructured and can be accessed from Windows once again.
The basic gist is that you download the file at the link and burn it to a CD with a program like Nero or Easy CD Creator, and you boot your PC with the defunct HDD hooked up as a spare with that newly-minted CD in the drive. The program will boot and say:
Then prompt you with a list of hard drives installed into the system you're working from. You'll want to select the hard disk size from the list that matches the Hard Disk you want to recover from; if, for example, the HDD you're trying to recover is 120GB, you'll select an entry that looks like this:
Then hit proceed.
The next step is to select the partition table, and you'll always want to select this option for a home PC HDD:
Now go here...
The NTFS partition is the virtual space in which all your files are stored on the physical disk. A partition is like a virtual filing cabinet: A well-labelled, well-kept filing cabinet. Well what happens if you take the cabinet away and dump all the contents on the ground? No one knows where anything is but the information is still there. Recreating the NTFS partition, which is our first step, will try to recreate the filing cabinet and put everything back in order.
TestDisk will show you what files are contained in this partition before writing the new partition information, so if the info looks right and familiar to you, go for it!
Hope this helps. We have some other options if this doesn't work.