2 of my hard drives crashed simutaneously, one was due to mechanical error and was replaced the other was due entirely to windows just doing what it always does... i lost many gigs of files to a corrupted windows filesystem and im now trying to recover as many of the "chk" files as possible, has anyone here had any luck at this? how did you do it? luckily most of the mapping project i was working on at the time of the disaster was saved from destruction.

wow. Big crash. Kind of odd that Foxhound has a similar crash recently.

Sorry, but no experience with data recovery.

My crash was a result of other issues but I lost the info regardless. Have you tried setting up the corrupted drive as a slave to a new master? If you can do this you might just get some of your old stuff back.

Cheers

That would also be my first guess too... but I know narc is smart enough to have thought of this. I am assuming that the drive is pretty much dead and he is now trying to recover files that have no index.

yep i did save the unconverted files to another disk it will still boot into the OS but its severely damaged and is cannabalizing itself, mechanically the drive seems to be ok. the chkdsk utility automatically runs whenever windows boots after a crash and turns damaged folders and all the contents into chk files. i tried the unchk utility from ericphelps.com, and it wasnt very successful. -- i wonder if a RAID setup would prevent system crashes from destroying files or if it would only redundantly destroy the files lol

narc writes...

raid would prevent it, but sata is better.
as to the problem, the one hard drive with mechanical problem you might be able to fix it, simply drop it on the ground few times and see what happenes, i know this is silly but it works sometime, it the hard drive start to work just get the files you need and gett new hd.
as to the the windows problem, get software called norton commander and run yor pc in to dos, then type nc or nv that dependence on your commander version.

edited on Nov. 23, 2005 10:05 am by mattK425

Sorry to hear your misfortune No pun intended.
A friend of mine had a crash similar to what u spaeak of. also lost alot of files.
I put his crashed hd in my comp as a slave drive and used
a tool named "Stellar Phoenix" It read and helped me recover "every" lost file on that hard drive. i was impressed.
prolly something you could try.

You gotta buy this software but if you need a copy let me know
I know what its like to lose info..... especially maps n stuff.