Day In The Life of Baz

I’m An Idiot

I had my secondary HD (120 GB IDE) partitioned with 2.8 GB FAT 32 and the rest NTFS. I think the smaller partition was what I used to use as a bridge for when I was interested in running linux. That ship had long sailed and I no longer needed it. Also, I was doing some stuff and got a low disk warning. So I decided that that extra 2.8GB would do me well. Also, I had plans on partitioning my main HD (250 GB SATA) to have a 100 GB section, because this is the faster drive. All this goes into modifiying my ideal system setup.

So I loaded up my trusty GParted Live CD in the DVD Drive and booted up. So my tasks were simple:

1. Delete the 2.8 GB partition on the IDE Drive
2. Resize the rest of the partition to fill the empty space
3. Resize the 250 partition on the SATA drive
4. Create a new 100 GB partition on the empty space.

Simple enough right? I set these up and started on my task and saw that the first two (2) steps would take 45 minutes. I didn’t want to wait around that long, especially since that was the lower priority task. So, like a royal idiot, I decided to cancel the task it was doing on the IDE drive. It spouted out some warning message, which was probably giving life and death warning. But who listens to those things anyway? I just confirmed and restarted Windows.

Reality Set In

Obviously, when Windows started there was no D: drive listed. I started to panic a bit, but I still didn’t think anything of it. I remember that GParted had a check feature. So I loaded it up again and made it check my IDE drive. It reported some problems with the partition and then asked whether I’d like to have them fixed. Of course I do, duh. So, I let it go along its merry way fixing my mistake.

I was kind of disappointed when it only took two (2) minutes, but I didn’t argue much. I restarted Windows to make sure that everything was ok. I didn’t expect a full recovery though. Obviously, when I canceled it must have been in the process of moving some files, so I expected to lose a few files.

So, Windows finally boots up and shows my D: drive. A smile came across my face and a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I scolded myself for being such and idiot and vowed that I would never do something that stupid again. Now, according to my ideal system setup, although this is my Secondary drive (not the boot drive) it does have all my important files (My Documents, Desktop, etc). After about five (5) seconds, Windows hit me with a hard slap to the face. I saw an error message saying that it could not load the Desktop files, which were on the D: drive. I opened up Windows Explorer and browsed to the drive. It was empty!!!

That was when reality set in. All my files….ALL MY FILES….were gone. I had stuff which was archived from years back. I had my MS Money files, that I’ve been managing for almost four (years). Everything was gone. The room started spinning, my head started to hurt, I felt nauseated, I needed to lie down, etc. I started kicking myself. Although I’d recently gotten a new computer system, equipped with a DVD burner I hadn’t burnt any backups of my data. I couldn’t even remember why I wanted to do all this partitioning shit anyway. I just wanted to die.

Get It Together Baz

After slapping myself for a few minutes, I decided to get to work and set what could be done about this. After all, it was only resizing the partition for less than a minute, how many files could have possibly been lost in that time? Yes, the drive was formatted, but that doesn’t mean anything, it was only a quick format. Files aren’t overwritten immediately. There must be some way to get most of them back. I started feeling better right away.

I had a few free undelete utilities that I put to work: Free Undelete and Undelete Plus. Usually these work perfectly on day to day activities. If I happen to delete a file by mistake, or if I overwrite a file and want a previous version of it. Both of these have proved to be great utilities under these circumstances. I guess the format was a bit too much for them. They took forever to scan the drive but returned with nothing of much use. Again, the nausea came back.

Then I remembered a tool, that I had used a few years back: GetDataBack NTFS. I went into my huge pile of CDs that I thought I would never use again. I even came across a Windows 95 CD, it was funny. Well, after about 1.5 hours to scan the file and 3 hours trying the different groups of recommended recoveries I had 95% of my data back, as far as I’ve been able to determine. There were some big files that got corrupted, mostly a few Anime movies, and a data backup of my C: Drive. But I could live with that.

Recommended File Recovery

So after all this what have I learned? I’ve learned a few ways to keep your data safe:

1. Back up your data.
2. Back up all your data
3. After this, back up your data some more
4. Try not to be a complete moron
5. Use free undelete software
6. If all else fails: GetDataBack NTFS

But most times, number 4 will bring you far.

Popularity: 19%

Share This

Similar Posts

• None Found