General Chat

Ok friend said something about partition was like it was missing. Am getting recommendations of local firms first will ring around and speak to the first if dont like sound of them wont go there. Do I just put data recovery firms I to google to find ones to send to?

From what you have posted yr best bet is to find somebody familiar with data recovery and let them do the job with their preferred software tools. A local firm should not charge more than £ 100 for recovering my documents inc photos. They will not need the whole PC just remove the hard drive. Recover the data to USB stick or DVD-R.

If money is tight then you can download free versions of most of the reliable software tools which will tell you the status of the hard drive and what (if anything) can be recovered. Some will fix a lost partition for free.

Based on which one you like best pay for the one you orefer. Software cost typically £ 30-40. The hard drive MUST be mounted in another computer which is working normally. Windows7 rrecommended. Very advisable that the person has a reasonable tech knowledge it is not something for beginners as one false move and your data is gone for good.

Do NOT try and use the hard drive once you have yr data back 'cos it will have bad physical sectors. You will need a replacement hard drive and will have to reinstall windows etc. Windows 10 is a whole lot better than Windows 8.x

Create a free backup account with dropbox and use it. Then whatever happens yr photos etc are safe. Local backup to another hard drive is of limited use and no use in a disaster situation such as fire flood and theft.

good luck

There was a time when hard drives went on and on seemingly for ever. Chinese and Asian hard drives made in the last five years cannot be relied on for more than two years and will generally fail within 5 years depending on usage. The cheapest way around it is to have two hard drives the same and use one as a mirror of the other. Windows has built in RAID software for doing this.

Up to and including Windows 7 a lot of people used to keep Windows and programs on one hard drive and data inc my documents on another one. It is the windows drive which tends to fail. Windows 8.x and 10 have made that strategy rather tricky which is a nuisance.

Another popular strategy is to install linux so that you can dual boot to windows or linux. Then if (when) windows goes t its up you can boot linux and still get at your data. That does depend on the parition being ok of course.

About 70% of pros use linux only as their primary operating system. Just a thought.

Rollo

My BiL who works for IBM has now got it and will look over Christmas see if he can find anything for me. X

Rollo after a stressful day health wise for youngest and my dad I am doing a little jig as sister just text to say BiL has found all but one lot of photos and saved to disc for me. He works away from home so will move onto the files at weekend when hes back home and will try and rebuild it all for me. big lesson learnt and thanks for you help. X

Told ya the data and pix were there, just hiding!
Very pleased at the outcome.

Once you have all the data recovered and backed up reture the faultly disk and get a new one. Typical cost is around £ 70.

There are several providers of cloud data backup some come free with your smartphone.

Dropbox has the advantage that it functions just like a disk drive making it easy to store all kinds of stuff. It is not tied to any particular phone or operating system. You can also create folders with it which you can share with others - family, tree researchers etc. That can be very handy and is far better than email attachments.

happy new year.

Quick scan showed nothing so he did longer one when sister text me at lunch today it had been going since yesterday and still only on 67% . Still don't understand any of it and as my memory has gone I will need to write everything down I future so I 'get it'

Rollo lookie I'm on my old computer, now has windows 10 eeeekkkkkkkk and all but one photo were restored even all my old files etc. One happy girl only thing is now have to sort out mouse as it only likes usb attached mouse apparently a common problem for people when upgrading to 10 but that can be sorted tomorrow when I will also buy loads of USB sticks to put everything on. x

Delighted that I was able to encourage you to recover all your data. Complimnts to your BiL who obviously understodd what he had to do.

Currys have pretty good USB mice for £ 10-20. The ones sold in supermarkets are mostly dreadful Expensive mice are either for gamers or profession graphics and design use there is no need to pay a lot.

Personally I prefer wireless mice and keyboards as it eliminates wires trailing around the desk.

I wouldn't even try to run a PS2 mouse with Windows 10 ! None of our macjines even have a socket for one. There is a bunch of control avail with a decent USB mouse (eg Gigabit, Microsoft) which you don't get with PS2 mice.

tip: do NOT format USB sticks they are often formatted in a special way to exFAT (FAT64) which can be upset with Windows format. NTFS is not a good chocie for sticks 'cos you cannot be certain that a stick written in one box will run in another. There ks more than one flavor of NTFS.

Get USB3 if you can they are downward compat. with USB2 and a whole lot faster with a USB3 machine which you will have sooner or later.

Also get them somewhere reputable. A lot of small fone and repair shops + eBay et al flog improbably good buys where about 20% of the claimed data is available and the rest very iffy.

most computers die of fuff and dust which makes them overheat. Buy a can of compressed aor and blow out the fluff from the power supply and the CPU fan.

happy new year

Thanks for that will make sure get decent sticks too much stress with family health at minute to have more computer stress so going to be goix girl and fo what I should of done in first place. was nice tonight listening to Tiddler playing her old videos and looking at photos and being so happy they were back. X

Glad you got it sorted Dawnie. Well done for the advice rollo. One thing please Rollo, in your post re USBs what does NTFS stand for?

I didn’t know either Ann so I googled and it came up with New Technology File System. Not sure I am much wiser now :-)