Something terrible happened to me... sigh...

[blurboiboi]

just formatted my laptop to downgrade my OS from vista to xp.... backup my files(including all my pics to an external HD)... after reinstalling xp, my system just cannot detect my external HD.... tried the HD on my friend's desktop, same problem... it reflects some kind of "unallocated" problem i think... there might be a chance ALL my photos will be lost, forever... sigh... so sad now...

thanks anthony for passing me the software to deep scan my drive... will try it this weekend... hopefully it works... meanwhile i think will just take a break from butt shoot, too depressed now unless some miracles happen soon... you guys have fun shooting ya??... always enjoy looking at flying jewels pics... shoot more post more.. :)

[Commander]

I can empathise with that, Terry. That's why we had this discussion (http://b-pals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6158) on backup hard disks and so on. Only when you lose your photos will you realise the pain and :mad2:.

It happened to me once many years back when my entire hard disk crashed with at least 2000 shots in it. Fortunately for me, in those days, I was still using slides. All my 'digital' shots were scanned from the slides, so even though I 'lost' my photos, the original slides were still there.

In today's totally digital age, once everything is lost, there is no recovery. Hence some of us are more kiasu than others, and have two or three (or more) sources of backups - CDROMs, DVD, external hard disks (with RAID 1, RAID 5, selective auto-backup programs, etc.) ;P

Sorry to hear that, Terry; at least some of us experienced that feeling of helplessness before. For those who have yet to experience it, my advice is to get yourself adequately protected by backups.

[benetay]

Have to fully agree with Khew on this subject, compatibility issue often occurs even with the same 'kind' of platform.

If you manage to backup the external HDD & you're sure about it, there are methods to recover it using some type of software. Take for e.g. those 'deleted' pictures in your HDD are not really 'deleted' there is always a possible way of retrieving it unless you hard formatted it.

I remember Canon used to give out free software that allow this to happen & i'm shock to see that there are a lot of photos that were recovered.

I feel for you Terry, like what Khew mention, backup with what ever you can afford. Even DVD are great. Either that or you can try bringing down to Sim Lim for them to extract everything from that HDD to another HDD.

Cheers!

[Silverstreak]

Terry,

You have my sympathy ! I had gone through a bad disk crash before and lost some data and photos.

Dun be too depress , the files are still there , from what you mentioned it is more like a problem of accessing the hardisk . You back it up while on Window Vista , have you tried accessing it from a Window Vista PC ?

In most instances, once the disk can be accessed you can recover the data fairly easily by softwares. Just dun try to write on the disk when it came online.

[Snowywolf]

just formatted my laptop to downgrade my OS from vista to xp.... backup my files(including all my pics to an external HD)... after reinstalling xp, my system just cannot detect my external HD.... tried the HD on my friend's desktop, same problem... it reflects some kind of "unallocated" problem i think... there might be a chance ALL my photos will be lost, forever... sigh... so sad now...


sorry to hear about that.
have you tried to view your HDD on other PCs with vista?
when i used my external HDD on mac (aft migrating fm Wins) i couldn't save or delete anything. I had to reformat all my HDD and hence a lot of migration work and stuffs.

perhaps you can try to view your HDD on another (other than the friend as mentioned above) vista OS PC instead and see if you might be able to get it to work. Trial and error might be the thing now, since you might as well assume that your data might be lost.

[Goondoo]

After you tried everything and couldn't work, pass it to me, I see what I can do. :cheers:

[Leopard Lacewing]

Oh dear! Sad to hear that, Terry!

I've experienced HD crashes many many times liao. The worst is when I backing up a "going to be faulty" PC-HD to a backup-HD, the PC-HD suddenly failed and not able to access anymore. The back-HD has incomplete backup and image file became corrupted. :cry:

Other then the above, another type of failure is almost like yours... the system suddenly pop up "unallocated disk" and forced me to reformat. Since this HD is not too important, I reformatted it... From 320GB it became 280GB. This kind of failure I encountered more than 3 times.

After so much bad experiences and now just want to have a safe backup, I started to backup on few HDs (2.5" and 3.5") using using those cables below (depending what type of HD - Sata, IDE or 2.5" HD). It only cost S$36. I also backup to DVDs too.
http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z307/leopardLacewing/Misc/USB_to_IDE.jpg


So better backup few copies to play safe... "Dun Play Play... lost of Butts pics is no joke" :bsmile:

Good luck to you, Terry. Hope you can recover your files.


Cheers!

[blurboiboi]

hi guys and gal...
thanks all... really appreciate your sympathies, all ur kind words and advices.... i will try doing a "deep scan" this coming weekend and see whether can the data be retrieved... if cannot then, sigh... Goondoo you can help???...
for the rest out there... do remember... i mean REMEMBER to do regular backups of your precious moments!!!!.... you would not want to go through what i had just went through... its really PAINFUL....
anyway... on the bright side... now w/o any pics... I believe for the next few butt shooting trip I would definitely have pluses since I had just "reset" my count.. heehee... :)

[Sky Blue]

Terry, sound like the partition in yr harddisk disappeared, you may also want to try this first: http://findandmount.com/

[blurboiboi]

Terry, sound like the partition in yr harddisk disappeared, you may also want to try this first: http://findandmount.com/

thanks soon chye... shall try it first thing tomorrow.. :)