sobering tale of hard drive headaches :-(

[gambit168 27]

Hi guys 
was using my laptop the other night and it locked up no keyboard commands could shake it
 ctl ,alt ,delete  could do anything so i rebooted  & it said 
NO O/S
So  i rebooted 
same shit 
rebooted into the bios HARD DRIVE 0= NONE    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????????  
so i put the recovery disk in the cd rom & rebooted so it goes through the motions blar blar 
says need to format the hard disk , I'm thinking  wow it sees the drive! maybe it is just scrambled & not fried !
so its tries but fails to put vista back onto the hard drive soI put it to one side & go dig out my old desktop that was relegated to the back room on account of all the fans being to noisy !!? for the delicate ears of others  from the back so fired it up & got it all up to speed with drivers & updates , I forgot I used Glary's DEFRAG in the past , & after a couple of boots windows said I need to run CHKDSK i thought nothing of it until it started to 
flag up a load of entries put $ in front of a bunch of files & said they are orphaned files !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????
So I'm thinking HOLY CRAP Not again after the crap i just had the alarm bells were ringing bigtime !!
booted into window looked in my computer ALL drives other than C said no data need to be formatted before being able to use them !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???????????????????

checked the NET & it's not uncommon from CHKDSK to ruin your day  !?

everyone said EaseUS is best recovery tool to use 
so I dl'd it &  it saw the raw data straight away BUT it only allows 10 files to be retrieved using the free trial 
& searching the drives is painfully slow !

anyway while all that is going on I thought well at least all my PSD's for FE2 & my other working on stuff is safe  because there on the external drive
so there is not way anything has buggered them up

WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????????????????

It was plugged into the bloody Laptops usb & the DRIVE the recovery disk found was IT & not the bloody DEAD internal drive I thought it was FORMATTING !!
SO when it said format to begin installation of vista IT FORMATTED MY BLOODY BACKUPS!!??

So now I have to RECOVER THAT BLOODY  300gb's of data also AT A SNAILS PACE!
 

[+Geezer 3,569]

RAVEN recently had a similar problem, and found a useful tool to recover lost files.  Maybe this will help you?

 

http://combatace.com/topic/84639-backup-backup-backup/

 

Bottom line: we should backup frequently, though I usually forget.