computer broke

[gusl]

Today my computer broke really badly. I had been a long time since I had seen a "blue screen of death". I had exactly one chance to restore my system, but I didn't take it, thinking I could restart again (Windows advised me to ignore it the first time it happened).
I'm trying to have my HD recovered, just when I finished organizing my 3 000 MP3s and shortly after I decided I should probably make a backup.

The problem is:
* Windows won't load, even in safe mode, even in "last working mode".
* I can't install Windows again on the same partition, because the partition is not recognized. The partition is "broken".
* I can't access my data from a new partition. OR CAN I?

Possible causes:
* there are some vague rumours about the latest Windows Update, which I had just installed.
* I impatiently turned off my machine because it was too slow to restart.

SOLUTION ATTEMPTS:
Tonight my technician is copying my HD to his machine. Then he will run an app called Tiramisu to try to recover my data. If that fails, I'll probably have to ship my HD to São Paulo to a company specialized in data recovery. I'm figuring out how much I'm willing to pay for that.

Even though I have an original WinXP license, I will probably end up installing a pirated Portuguese version of Windows, because my mom lost my System Restore CD during a room "clean up". I protest uselessly. To her, appearance of order is more important than actual order. "Cleaning up" means mixing music CDs and computer CDs together.

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

That's really sad. I was afraid my computer had died a few days ago, but it turns out it had just turned off when I thought it went to sleep, and I had to push the startup button extra hard a few extra times. I hope you recover your things, or ideally the computer works again.

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

Dell PCs often have a problem with the startup button on the front. If necessary you can remove the front cover and press the real startup button. (The one on the front just uses a small plastic lever to press the real button.)

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

Well, chances are it's just the partition info that's damaged. Bear in mind that, since the breakdown happened quickly, your data is still there (unless your HD can erase ??GB in a fraction of a second, which it can't). Probably what's gone wrong is that the section of the disk detailing how it's partitioned has been
written over.

This has happened to me before. Once I realised that my info was still there, I realised that "all" that needed to be done was to rewrite the crucial partition info. I didn't know how to do this, but it took me about 2 days of research and a few hours of very, very cautious work to get it working again.

I don't recall the details, but basically it went like this: search for disk editing programs on the net. There's a good few of the around; they should boot from the bios off a floppy, and let you hex edit the disk. Also look for info on how partitions are described. All it basically involves (assuming there's no other damage to your disk) is rewriting a few sequences of bytes, each of which holds the position on the disk in blocks where partitions begin and end.

By the way, with this kind of disk editor program, you can verify that most (if not all) of your data is still there... you should be able to see plain text, file headers, etc, at certain points on the disk, It's possible that some files are lost, but it's unreasonable that a lot of it is. Even apart from the price of getting the HD repaired, you might want to try your hand first. You can't ruin anything that a data recovery company can't repair by fiddling with a few bytes, and you might find a hands-on approach less hassle that trusting the happy recovery fairies to magically make everything better...

Good luck anyway. I had this problem a few days before an essay (on the computer, obviously) was due. Now they were fun days.

s.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. I got all worked up trying to not get my hopes up, but what you said makes sense.

So did you copy the disk somewhere else before editing it?

[ataltane.livejournal.com]

No, but that's because I didn't have anywhere to copy it. If you can, it would make sense to make a backup.

I'm not sure how you would do this - you'd need something that copied the disk byte by byte, and eschewed makeing use of any logical info on the disk, since that's where the fault is.

Then again, the kind of editing I'm suggesting doesn't affect the data on the disk at all, outside of the partition info, so i wouldn't expect to lose anything. All the same, I suppose a backup is advisable (I suppose an OS could do some damage if it got its hands on a half-repaired file system and tried something funny).

good luck. Take your time, and think it out. Googling for "disk mbr edit partition repair" gives some helpful-looking pages immediately.