I just made a BIG mistake

Recently when restarting my system a couple after it crashed i now got on start up 'Disk boot failure Insert system disk and press enter', so as usual i cant find the disk and asked for one form the manufacturer (demonite), they sent the wrong one! So i tried using an Xp disk from another PC this started the system if i jsut left the system it owuld run fine however if i have to turn off or restart the system i get the same problem,

S eventually this got quite annoying so i tried the windows repair console, typed FIXBOOT and it said fixed restarted and then said cannot continue or somethin along those lines,

Then stupidly i reinstalled windows xp before thinking and now i have lost evertything, my music, photos, programs, important emails, settings everything!

Is there anyway i can get it all back?

I have looked at system restore but it is not possible,

Please help me as this is the 2nd time this has happened to me!

If you re-installed over the top i.e DIDN'T delete/create new partition and/or re-format.

Then most of your old pics/music will be found in one of the folders inside here >

C:\Documents and Settings\

If you DID partition/format, a professional data retrieval service may be able to help (very expensive, otherwise all is lost probably

I think i did partition/format because everything has gone even all my desktop settings etc

ok i will have a look later, is there anyway that i would be able to return it to how it was because i had quite a few important emails and programs etc that were installed on the system

sorry to hear of your mishap. you might try a system recovery software prog before handing your HDD to a professional. the latter might cost you thousands (or if you are lucky high-hundreds for sure). the software should cost you less than $150.

the software you want should boot from your DVD/CD drive (be sure to have that set up in your BIOS). it will boot into a flavor of Linux and there you will be able to select the drive(s) from the selection it presents to you where you want to retieve data.

you can then save what it finds to an external (USB) hdd.

the programs you need not worry about. you can reinstall them on your new drive. it's your data you want, right?

check this site...
http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/software.htm

OR

this service for $380.

http://www.gillware.com/?campaign=googleOptGen

Google for hard drive data recovery and you will find more stuff.

good luck.

Hey guys i have looked at the files left on the system and there is nothing at all left from before,

i have been looking at the site some of you recommended and came across this, 'RecoverSoft™ Data Rescue PC' http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/recoversoft.htm now if i used this, say that i can't get back what i need, would i ruin the chance of a data recovery company being able to retreve the data?

EDIT: Ideally what i would want to do is go back to how the system was running before but i dont think that will happen will it?

Originally Posted by RabidDog

Yes it is very easy to get your system back! simply get out your neatly labelled once weekly backups and then use the "restore" function of your software. You do have backups dont you? as you say all your stuff was very important.. and you were about to fiddle about re-installing the system. Always remember, a hard disk wipe is Gods (bill Gates) way of getting your system to run faster!

A real big mistake is forgetting to pull your trousers down

Belive me Rabid Dog i will be from now on as this is the 2nd time it has happened!

So do you think the software will help me?

A couple of back up programs that are popular: Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost. There are freeware alternatives, but those two have a good reputation.

Unfortunately, neither will help with your present situation, but for next time........

Hey guys got an update!

Right i had a go with RecoverSoft Data Rescue all i had to do was burn the iso to a disk and insert it into the troubled machine so no dismantling was nessesary it would automatically boot from the bios.

So i left it scanning and the results listed my 2 drives so i chose the drive i wiped and it began scanning the drives, it returned 2 results, 1st was a partition and the other was recovered files, so i chose recovered files then it began making a list this took about an hour, when finished i checked the results and this is what it returned:

62,634 files found, 31 folders found, 59,681,398,340 bytes

When looking in the list the follwing file extensions were given:

avi, mov, mp3, wav, wma, wmv, mid, ogg, am, zip, rar, cab, gz, bmp, gif, jpeg, png, psd, tiff, chm, hlp, wmf, msp, plx, eml, dbx, wab, xml, ole, rtf, doc, pst, xls, pdf, html, ppt. Not all the files had proper names so was hard for me to tell what there were, they would be listed as numbers and an extension i.e 34662247853.gif

when viewing the folder listed as 'multimedia' i looked in the subfolder 'MP3' and to my joy i found a list of all my music! YAY!

Also from what i remember i know i had at least 100GB spare on the drive and its only a 160GB so those bytes look promising as well!

So does this look like i may have retreved all my stuff back?

Hopefully. The only way you'll know if when you click on a recovered wav or mp3 and it plays.

Very True Soopafresh! One thing i did notice is that alot of the mp3's are replicated in the lists some time as many as 4 times but all the same size

Ricoman that is the 1st thing on my list to do when i finish work tomorrow!

Any ideas why some of the files are duplicated?

right yesterday i went out and bought myself a Maxtor One touch III external drive and using RecoverSoft Data Rescue i have managed to successfully recover 128,248 files at 67.7GB, what would you guys recommened i do to start getting back to where i was?

Yes i have some of most of them have open played etc, i just thought that maybe i would have to move some of the files to restore some of the programs