I am writing to this forum for the sole purpose of doing what I promised to do, if by some miraculous miracle I was able to rescue the crucial data from some 3years plus off of my 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 Hard Drive...........well, miracles do happen. I looked and looked for references to a solution to the "CATASTROPHIC LOSS OF INFORMATION" I had suffered. I could not even find one success story (one guy had about a 60% recovery of files). So here are my original notes that I took right after this

horrifying mishap took place.

====================Original Notes After Catastrophe==================

}}} I took my 250 gig maxtor ultra ata/133 drive (that had every important file of mine for the past 2.5 years) from my main machine (the avenger) mistaking it for an identical drive(that had little or no files on it) I installed it into my compaq d510 small factor desktop as a slave drive to an XP pro OS installed 3.2 GB Hard Drive. it booted to the blue Scandisk GUI (CHKDSK) and proceeded to "Deleting" orphan file record segment 3???,Deleting orphan file record segment 3??? and so on and so forth"

perform this automated function of apparantly deleting all these files. I let it continue as I had thought it was the other drive. the computer then booted and it could see the drive and it had maybe 3 folders on it.....which had a few files. I then erased a folder or file or files that were chk file/s i believe. then when i realized the mistake, i uninstalled the drive and put it back in the avenger and when it booted it also booted to the Blue Scandisk GUI (CHKDSK) and proceeded to "inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 25" at which point it appeared to hang on that (although it may have been repeating the entry over and over so it appeared to be stuck) at this point i stopped anything else from happening and that is where i am at right now. What will I have to do to possibly recover from this "catastrophic Loss Of Information" ?


Compaq D510 Small Factor Desktop
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB PATA133
mod # BAH41B70 {{{

======================Meanwhile Back At The Ranch==================

So from the internet I was able to find out what had basically happened in laymen's terms. The
original computer that this HD was in was an XP PRO Machine with Service Pack 2 installed. The machine that I had temporarily install this HD in was an XP PRO Machine without any service pack installation.

It turns out that any XP install without Service Pack 2 will not see a drive of over 137GB(?). And that, It also turns out, was the reason CHKDSK had decided that this drive was corrupted or "needed to be checked for consistency" and then proceeded to delete what it saw as orphan files.

1--->So I installed SP2 (WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe) on the 2nd Machine..........put the drive back in and let it boot. It did the same thing "it booted to the Blue Scandisk GUI (CHKDSK) and proceeded to "inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 25" at which point it appeared to hang"

2--->I booted with a bootable CD version of SpinRite 6.0 and ran the Data Recovery Mode....when I saw the results my heart sank...especially because I didn't see any obvious signs of files to retrieve. I will admit that the results were very technical and above my head.But so far, this program's GUI had been very user-friendly, so I pretty much understood it as "tough luck pal"

3--->Went ahead and booted to XP and it did very much the same thing as before "CHKDSK....Check For
Consistency.....inserting an entry....and hung there.

4--->booted again, this time bypassing CHKDSK only to find the drive was all there, but there was just those same two folders as before.

5--->Put the drive back in the 1st machine, when booting it did same thing as before again "CHKDSK.... Check For Consistency... inserting an entry... and hung there.

6--->Bypassed CHKDSK and booted to XP..........

7--->HERE IS WHAT I DID THAT was different than any other solutions that I could FInd On the net. I did a system restore to a point when I knew the Drive was in the machine and the configuration was exactly the same. When the system WAS RESTORED to that earlier Restore Point with the Configuration exactly the same......my beloved 250GB Hard Drive with 3 + years of irreplacable files WAS ALSO RESTORED ....I could not believe it.....I am still thinking it might be a dream. As far as I can tell, none of the files are corrupt or empty or missing (this may not be the case, I will only know after more test runs and checking out files)

===========================NUT SHELL=============================

IN A NUT SHELL.
Put drive back in original machine (XP with SP2) and do a SYSTEM RESTORE to a POINT when the drive was
part of the exact configuration that you are restoring to.

===========================FINE=============================

I know this was A Very Long Post.....but I made promises to all the cyber-gods as well as my own, if I could just get back any of the files I had all but lost. SO there it is, now to fulfil the other promise I made... BACK UP THAT IRREPLACABLE DRIVE!!! BACK UP THAT IRREPLACABLE DRIVE!!! BACK UP THAT IRREPLACABLE DRIVE!!!

how about that extraordinary good fortune? y'all're one lucky person.

I agree ! After all you did with this poor hard disk, you're a VERY lucky man !

Amen to both the above - don't count on that save method the next time!! You were lucky this time, mainly because you did not overwrite the drive with new data. Congratulations!

That’s the moral of this intriguing story I guess; can you type that ten million times?

Hi ebenezercoreII Welcome to SAF.

Happy you were able to get your files back. I know that feeling of loosing your files, and being able to find them again.

I just today, did anorher full system backup of my 'C' drive on to my second internal hard drive, and a backup of every file on the computer on a external hard drive. "BACK UP THAT IRREPLACABLE DRIVE!!!" is the way to go.

Lorraine