Everything is ok now.
My wife tanked our XP drive a week ago. I've been trying to repair it to no avail. The MFT was toasted as well as the boot files, and the mirror files of each.
Add to this: My backups were months old, my backup drive was at my shop in another town.
What to do?
Grabbed an older drive, installed XP again and slaved the toasted drive. Tried a couple recovery apps but none would recover the files with any recognizable file names or the original dates. Just endless filenames like "unknown000023.jpg"
This would leave me with about 17,000 or more picture files alone to sift through, not to mention the rest of the file types, emails, etc.
Grabbed yet another old drive, installed Ubuntu Linux.
Still couldn't recover the files properly, but DAMN is it cool.
Went back to the XP drive and searched in earnest for a good app.
I discovered the holy grail:
File Scavenger.
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
Got back all of my original files, with the original file names and dates, in the original directories where they were stored. All backed up onto an external USB drive now. Archiving onto DVD's tonight.
Now to pull everything back into Ubuntu and I'm golden.
Goodbye XP. It's been nice.
My wife tanked our XP drive a week ago. I've been trying to repair it to no avail. The MFT was toasted as well as the boot files, and the mirror files of each.
Add to this: My backups were months old, my backup drive was at my shop in another town.
What to do?
Grabbed an older drive, installed XP again and slaved the toasted drive. Tried a couple recovery apps but none would recover the files with any recognizable file names or the original dates. Just endless filenames like "unknown000023.jpg"
This would leave me with about 17,000 or more picture files alone to sift through, not to mention the rest of the file types, emails, etc.
Grabbed yet another old drive, installed Ubuntu Linux.
Still couldn't recover the files properly, but DAMN is it cool.
Went back to the XP drive and searched in earnest for a good app.
I discovered the holy grail:
File Scavenger.
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
Got back all of my original files, with the original file names and dates, in the original directories where they were stored. All backed up onto an external USB drive now. Archiving onto DVD's tonight.
Now to pull everything back into Ubuntu and I'm golden.
Goodbye XP. It's been nice.
