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My computer crashed yesterday and I couldn't get it to reboot so I had to reformat my hard drive. Is there any glimmer of a hope that my files might be hidden somewhere on the hard drive? I lost over 60 gigs of music yesterday!
It's almost certainly too late now, but if this happens again, or if someone else has this problem, here's what I'd do:
Go to a friend's computer, search for ubuntu 8.10 (a linux-based operating system), and download the .iso file. Burn this file onto a CD-rom or DVD. Go back to the affected computer, pop the CD-Rom into the drive, and start it up. The computer should attempt to boot from the CD before it tries the hard drive. If it does not, restart it and as soon as the monitor powers on it will tell you to hit f2 or f12 or another one of the function keys for setup. Hit this key and you can then select the boot order, which is the order in which the computer tries to load up an operating system from one of the various devices. This is much easier than it sounds. Set it to boot from the CD or DVD drive and restart with the ubuntu disk in the drive. A menu will come up and give you the option of installing ubuntu or running it from the CD drive.
Once your computer boots up into the ubuntu operating system, you can access the files on the hard drive and copy what you need. If you have two optical drives (CD or DVD drives) you can burn the files that are on your computer onto a disk.
OR if you feel comfortable with the ubuntu OS you can also install it to a "partition" on your hard drive, which will keep everything that is already on your hard drive. You can then access the files that way. It's too bad you didn't ask before you reformatted - that's a pretty extreme measure and you probably could have saved everything you wanted to save had you done this first.
After reading a few sites, perhaps I spoke too soon. Some say that formatting doesn't erase anything at all, it just sets a 'switch' on each sector of the drive that tells the computer the sector is empty. As long as you don't overwrite new data onto the drive all the original data should be there.
Hopefully the OP hasn't overwritten anything yet.
I still think the ubuntu boot disk solution is the easiest for getting vital data from a hard drive when the OS won't boot, although it would take a long time to transfer 60 gigs using a flash drive.
After reading a few sites, perhaps I spoke too soon. Some say that formatting doesn't erase anything at all, it just sets a 'switch' on each sector of the drive that tells the computer the sector is empty. As long as you don't overwrite new data onto the drive all the original data should be there.
Hopefully the OP hasn't overwritten anything yet.
I still think the ubuntu boot disk solution is the easiest for getting vital data from a hard drive when the OS won't boot, although it would take a long time to transfer 60 gigs using a flash drive.
Well they overwrote some of it already because they're posting using the same computer.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will definitely be looking into those.
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