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[Azwethinkweiz]

So last night before I go to sleep I decide to run disk defrag because I hadn't done so in a while. When I wake up this morning it says it's finished but that there were a few files it couldn't move for whatever reason. I think nothing of it and proceed to start up WoW. While starting up it crashes and says it can't read one of the files. I try again and I get the same result so I figure I'll just do a reboot. Upon reboot windows takes forever to load and all the icons on my desktop won't load. I finally get into My Computer and try to explore the hard drive and I get a nice message telling me I need to reformat my hard drive. I reboot into safe mode, same thing. I try to rollback to a previous day and windows tells me there are no restore points. I reinstalled windows and not a damn thing has changed. I don't think it's the drive because I have my windows partitioned seperately on the same drive and it's running fine. So is there any possible way I might be able to save my data? I have the most important stuff backed up, but there are some things I'd like to have back.

 

[DJ Sl4m]

Hmm, if it were me I'd change your pagefile setting to "no page file", then reboot.
Defrag with no page file on the OS drive, then once it's done add your page file setting back.

Or download the demo of vopt defrag and defrag the drive including the pagefile.
It's defrag, reboot on it's on, defrag again, and reboot once more.

Most defraggers don't defrag the page file, much less move it, the only defrag program that will move the page file closest to the front of the hdd is vopt, not even the mighty diskeeper will do that.

That may be what the problem was, it's worth a shot considering how easy it is to do.

 

[Azwethinkweiz]

I downloaded vopt defrag but the messed up partition doesn't even show up on the list. Is there any way I can get it to defrag or even see an non-NTFS partition?

 

[SpoonyBard]

What does chkdsk /f say? I hope you are not using FA32 file system with Windows 2k or XP.

 

[DJ Sl4m]

I downloaded vopt defrag but the messed up partition doesn't even show up on the list. Is there any way I can get it to defrag or even see an non-NTFS partition?

I'm assuming you are running XP ?
If so it comes with Diskeeper lite, you can still disable the pagefile, reboot and defrag it diskeeper recognizes it.

 

[Azwethinkweiz]

What does chkdsk /f say? I hope you are not using FA32 file system with Windows 2k or XP.

No, it's NTFS, or at least it was anyway.

Edit: just did chkdsk /f. It says it's an NTFS file system, then during the check it gives me an assload of record segments that are unreadable.

 

[Azwethinkweiz]

Seeing as how this is not looking good for me, does anyone know of any free data recovery software that I could use?

 

[SpoonyBard]

I didn't find any good free ones when my old hard drive went tits up few years ago, but I was able to save some files with trial versions of commercial software. Can't remember what they were called...

 

[Deg]

Is there data recovery software for mmc cards?

 

[Deg]

add phone memory to that

 

[Discharger]

There's a good one I ran into the other day called Handy Recovery. There's a trial version that works for 30 days, so you should be able to grab a lot of the stuff that way.

It seems to work well. One of the guys at work I talked to about it said that it was able to pull a file off his hard drive back from 1998 - he has formatted his pc probably 4-5 times since then so it looks like it's pretty good