It must be Boxing day -- I'm ready to hit something.

[xiphias]

1. Our car is still burning a quart of oil every week or so.
2. The bathroom sink -- the gasket that held the metal pipe that goes down from the drain to the S-trap rotted off completely. It does solve the "the gasket is dripping when you use the sink" problem, but introduces the "water gushes out of where the gasket had been if you use the sink" problem.
3. Lis's computer wouldn't boot. So she got some boot/rescue CDs. And one of them overwrote the FAT, as well as some other files. We don't know which files it overwrote, of course, because, as far as her computer knows, it doesn't have ANY files on it.

Comments

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

There is software that could help restore the FAT. I've heard good things about GetDataBack, which has a trialware version.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's going to be a pain, though.

The data's there, obviously, except for whatever was written over by the Maxtor disk when it started installing things.

But:

The computer it's in doesn't boot of itself.
The computer it's in, when booted from an external boot CD, doesn't really recognize the existence of the hard drive as it was created.
It recognizes the hard drive that Maxtor started to create, so Maxtor has created its own separate FAT at this point.

So, the data are THERE -- but how do we get to them without damaging things further?

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Does the computer have a floppy drive? If so, you should be able to use a working computer to create a bootable floppy, then put GetDataBack on it. Run the program and see what, if anything, it says it can do with the bad hard drive. If that doesn't seem helpful, you might trying buying a copy of Norton SystemWorks or something similar.

Once you get it working again, I strongly recommend using something like Carbonite to keep the hard drive backed up in case something like this recurs.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have another hard drive?
Pop another drive in the machine, make it the boot drive and make the old drive the secondary. Then boot off the new drive. Even if the boot sector is gone on the old drive, you should be able to restore the old drive as a D drive and copy the files.

dod