photocliff

LAst year I pluged in an secondary internal drive while the comp was turned on. It fried the circut board on the main C drive. I lost a few photo events that my wife placed onto the desktop. 10 months Later I found on Ebay someone selling the circut board for that drive. It works perfect and I was able to hook it back up and boot the old drive back up as if it was the main drive. All this after puting a new c drive in back when it happened.
Photos recovered and wife is happy with me again!

Gun Jam

wow I didnt know you could replace and IDE board let alone buy one I just always assumed they were really well integrated and besides they never fail anyhow (except in your case) its always the head that crashes.

Adrenolin

Since you found the files in a folder called found.000 tells me the drive itself is likely just fine. These folders are hidden system folders and usually created during a chkdsk or some other type of disk scan. Save your files elsewhere, format the drive and you'll be good to reinstall it back into your system.

The cheapest route to ensure your files are safe is to purchase 2 of the external drives such as the MyBook 1Terabyte drives. I have a number of these which get extensive use and haven't given me any issues. Save your files to your PC and to one of these externals. When not using the files simply unplug the drive from your PC. Once a week or so plug both externals in and use any of the free sync programs online to ensure a backup to the 2nd external. Even just 1 external backup drive should be used along with keeping the files on your PC as well.

I do not like or trust online data backups.

I've used Linux since 1993 both personally and professionally. In this case it would have prevented this type of thing from happening. For a cheap fileserver you can use damn near any PC made in the last 15 years, a disk or more, install Linux and you'll be good. I've never lost a file on any Linux system that I managed over the last 17 years aside from the occasional drive failure (ie the drive is dead and doesn't spin up). Add any type of RAID redundancy (aside from 0/mirroring) and your well protected.

For those IT and computer geeks here.. I still have an old dual Pentium 200 system here, built in 1995/96 iirc. It contains the first dual Pentium mainboard made by Tyan Mainboards, 16mb of ram, a 1gig hard drive and was used by myself and a few developers to test the dual cpu code in the Linux Kernel. Its been running 24/7 since 96. Its had Debian Linux installed on it since it was built. I remember back when it easily served 200+ websites, hosting email for each and even provided telnet (gasp) and ftp services on a dedicated 128k ISDN connection.

eZ

OOh Hijack!!!

My home computer wont turn on any more. I took it somewhere and I guess it needs new motherboard. Is there any way I can retreive my pictures from my C: drive without turning my computer on? It has all of my restoration pictures on it!! oh and my wedding pictures too LOL.

Derf00

eZ:

yes, You'll need a laptop or other desktop and get a SATA/IDE to USB adapter cable and power adapter (about 20 bucks on Newegg). Take the drive out of the your computer, plug it into the adapter and plug the adaptor's USB port into the available USB port on the Laptop or other desktop. your old HD It will show up in the Explorer window as an external storage device. Just navigate teh folders until you find your pictures and transfer them.

Adrenolin: You should have mentioned that frequent Chkdsk scans on boot up are often signs of a failing harddrive. In this case it was probably cause by a file getting corrupted when the external connection was beign made and disconnected so no biggie but if it happens again, the drive in question is probably failing.

rmodel65

your upset about this how about i had tons of pics in a photo album and someone stole it...seriously wtf i had no digital copies

valley firearms

I foolishly deleted hundreds of pics that I thought were copies. I kept getting a warning saying that most of my disk space was used up. These were family pics and pics of my car from day one until last year. Is there any way to get them back?

JMD

YES, if you don't use your computer.

The pictures will be available for recovery via a "special" program up until the newly freed disk space is used by another file. "Swap files" will be your biggest enemy here.

valley firearms

thanks buddy. It's been over 6 months so they are long gone. Most likely layers of **** have taken their place