Technology woes

[Elumia]

Just when you think you are doing the right thing....

I made back-ups of my files on a USB hard drive. In the meantime, I proceeded to (try)rebuild my 4 year old IBM thinkpad to its original settings.

I reloaded from rescue disks and it all seems to function properly. Sooooo I go to put my files back from the portable drive. You guessed it, can't read it. Plug it into the work machine, a Dell. It seems to see the drive, but says insert disk. I hear a clicking sound when I power up the USB hard drive. Methinks it is dead. Argh... called a data recovery place, and they seem to agree. I'd like to recover the drive. Anyone know of an economical resource? The data would be nice to have, but the place I called seemed to think that they would have to do clean room work and it would cost like $1500 or so. The data is not that important, but I'd pay $300 or so if I could get my stuff. Fortunately, I had just bought a 4G USB flash drive and downloaded nearly all the pictures. The USB drive has mainly my outlook info and some other files that I would like to have.

Second question for those in the know. When I reloaded XP from the IBM rescue disks, it made a partition called IBM service, Drive E:. This is not a big deal as I assume that this is used for later recovery if needed. The issue is that the HD is 40Gig. Looking at Computer management, Disk management, The primary partition with XP and my programs, C: drive is partitioned at 19.19 GB NTFS (now only 50% free). The E: partition is 15.08 GB FAT32 (85% free) which seems too big for a service partition and wasteful of my HD. I don't want to start over, I don't recall any questions for this, and I am afraid if I do it again, the service partition my even get larger! Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark

[Nitetimes]

Just when you think you are doing the right thing....

I made back-ups of my files on a USB hard drive. In the meantime, I proceeded to (try)rebuild my 4 year old IBM thinkpad to its original settings.

I reloaded from rescue disks and it all seems to function properly. Sooooo I go to put my files back from the portable drive. You guessed it, can't read it. Plug it into the work machine, a Dell. It seems to see the drive, but says insert disk. I hear a clicking sound when I power up the USB hard drive. Methinks it is dead. Argh... called a data recovery place, and they seem to agree. I'd like to recover the drive. Anyone know of an economical resource? The data would be nice to have, but the place I called seemed to think that they would have to do clean room work and it would cost like $1500 or so. The data is not that important, but I'd pay $300 or so if I could get my stuff. Fortunately, I had just bought a 4G USB flash drive and downloaded nearly all the pictures. The USB drive has mainly my outlook info and some other files that I would like to have.

Second question for those in the know. When I reloaded XP from the IBM rescue disks, it made a partition called IBM service, Drive E:. This is not a big deal as I assume that this is used for later recovery if needed. The issue is that the HD is 40Gig. Looking at Computer management, Disk management, The primary partition with XP and my programs, C: drive is partitioned at 19.19 GB NTFS (now only 50% free). The E: partition is 15.08 GB FAT32 (85% free) which seems too big for a service partition and wasteful of my HD. I don't want to start over, I don't recall any questions for this, and I am afraid if I do it again, the service partition my even get larger! Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark

Don't know what to tell you about the USB drive except maybe take it apart and hook the drive directly to a ribbon cable as a slave and see if it'll give you your data back, I've done it before and it works sometimes.

As for the rest, it looks to me like it just made another partition and left your old stuff in the other one.
Best bet...reformat...start over, usually a better option anyway.

[toypusher]

Just when you think you are doing the right thing....

I made back-ups of my files on a USB hard drive. In the meantime, I proceeded to (try)rebuild my 4 year old IBM thinkpad to its original settings.

I reloaded from rescue disks and it all seems to function properly. Sooooo I go to put my files back from the portable drive. You guessed it, can't read it. Plug it into the work machine, a Dell. It seems to see the drive, but says insert disk. I hear a clicking sound when I power up the USB hard drive. Methinks it is dead. Argh... called a data recovery place, and they seem to agree. I'd like to recover the drive. Anyone know of an economical resource? The data would be nice to have, but the place I called seemed to think that they would have to do clean room work and it would cost like $1500 or so. The data is not that important, but I'd pay $300 or so if I could get my stuff. Fortunately, I had just bought a 4G USB flash drive and downloaded nearly all the pictures. The USB drive has mainly my outlook info and some other files that I would like to have.

Second question for those in the know. When I reloaded XP from the IBM rescue disks, it made a partition called IBM service, Drive E:. This is not a big deal as I assume that this is used for later recovery if needed. The issue is that the HD is 40Gig. Looking at Computer management, Disk management, The primary partition with XP and my programs, C: drive is partitioned at 19.19 GB NTFS (now only 50% free). The E: partition is 15.08 GB FAT32 (85% free) which seems too big for a service partition and wasteful of my HD. I don't want to start over, I don't recall any questions for this, and I am afraid if I do it again, the service partition my even get larger! Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark

OK, I do data recovery, but would have to have the drive in my hands to even tell if I could recover the data. Do you know if the drive still spins?

You probably could take the computer to a repair shop and have them resize the partions for your with PartionMagic or a similar program. How much free space does the E (fat32) partion have?

As an aside note. I would firmly believe that you do not need the E drive at all. If you have backup software (like Ghost or TrueImage), then when you get the system setup as you want it, then just do a complete image of the HD on DVDs or to another machnine, etc. You could then reformat the entire drive and restore the image of the C: partition to the machine. You will still have the original image if you need it at a later date.

Frequent backups (or better yet, images) of your HD are a must.

[Elumia]

I believe the drive spins, feels like it is. When I power it up, it sounds like it is spinning up, but makes clicking sounds. after a few tries, seems like it doesn't boot its firmware and shuts down. It is a western digital model WD800B008-RNN

The E: partition is 85% free (15.06 GB FAT32, 12.87 GB free) I found EASEUS on line. They offer data recovery SW that I might be able to use to get the data off the IBM laptop's hard drive that was there before I "recovered" it. That's where the most valuable data was.

They also have a free partition manager. Are you familiar with them?

http://www.easeus.com/product.htm

Mark

[toypusher]

I have not heard of them, but they seem to offer what you might need.

[S. Heisley]

Before you tear it apart, you might want to hook your USB hard drive to a friend's computer (or a computer at work?) and see if you can read any of your information that way. If you can, you'll know your backed-up info is good but you computer or software is the problem.

Better safe than unnecessarily destroyed!

[S. Heisley]

One more thing... If I remember correctly, XP had a thing where they gave you an extra copy of the program that, when you installed it, they gave you instructions on how to back that part up and they said you could only do it once.

Here's the point: I recently had to start over from 'scratch', like you. However, I used the XP backup disk that I had made according to their instructions and didn't end up with the same problems as you are having. My point is that if you used the original XP startup kit and never backed it up according to the instructions, the partitioned 'E' drive data may be that extra copy. So, if you follow the XP instructions to backup your programs to CD's, the data on the 'E' drive may pull off at that time(?) I know it's a long shot but all you've got to loose is a couple CD's and a little bit of time.

Dang! Computer problems are pain in the neck, back, and where we sit!

[bve]

You can resize the partitions with Gparted fairly easily, no need to spend money at some pc place http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php it is free and fairly intuitive to use too.

As for the usb drive, I would do the same as Nighttimes has suggested.

[TheBizMan]

When I reloaded my XP, I just deleted the 'E' drive. It's been working fine for over a year. The reason I had to reload was I got hacked and that was the only way to clear it up. If I ever catch any hacker...