Wedge

Lost my fuckin' Deideo.txt file... >_< (Again, the gibberish binary problem.)

I'd been working on that file for TWO YEARS. Was to be the basis of a complex website with a database of 'stolen' music in movies (i.e. uncredited inspiration from other movies.)
Oh, my girlfriend is going to be so happy about that... She said I shouldn't build that site, that someone would sue me for that. I still wanted to do it. I'm screwed, but not the way she thought... :(

@Aaron> I think the gibberish just means "the MFT was corrupted, and from what we managed to gather, your data was in that cluster, and if it's not, bad luck."
So I don't really see how Linux is going to magically find the correct cluster...!

No, no encryption on my hard drives. I can confirm.

Yes, the USB stick is bootable -- I used it to boot my EeePC after I lost its partition.

Backups: most of my backups are on a hard drive I have yet to test (I'll do it tomorrow). If that particular drive is safe, then I should be able to get back my SMF folder. But I don't think I saved a lot of data otherwise... I know that Deideo.txt was probably not part of it. Because it was in the root folder of C:\, and not in a folder called C:\Root\ where I kept my important text files to save. I'll see... Grmpf.
The other problem is that last Wednesday, I bought myself a new 500GB external drive precisely to store my files and make room for backups... But I was too busy on the Wine redesign and didn't take the time to build these backups. Instead I deleted a lot of the backup files so I could rebuild them from scratch (incremental backups take less space when rebuilt from scratch from time to time.)
It was REALLY a fucking stroke of bad luck for me this week.

Give this a try Nao. I have successfully recovered data from a drive Windows wouldn't touch with this program.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Use Ubuntu! Instead of installing use the "live cd" feature and see if it can recover your data.. Fingers crossed!!

Sorry to badger on, but are you absolutely sure? I mean, I know Firefox encrypts its password databases, as should any proper password manager.

Definitely try a non-Windows solution to try and recover more data, though.

All right, I'll try tomorrow...

Uh, I just found a copy of Deideo.txt. A backup. YAY. Then I looked at the date... December 2009. Right. You gotta be kidding me. Most of my work on this file was done precisely in early 2010... >_<

:edit: Ah, phew... Found a copy from last February. Good! (See below.)

@Aaron> Nope, it's just screwed up. Here's the (un)funny thing. I salvaged my C: root earlier today, and put it into its own folder. Then I salvaged the entire C: this evening, and checked the salvaged Deideo, and it was corrupted. Now I just checked the copy I'd salvaged this afternoon, and it's in a correct state. Meaning that either xcopy doesn't do things the same way as Windows 7's explorer-based file copy function (and it doesn't do them very well!), or, more likely (because the original file is corrupted to me), the hard drive got in a worse state in the meantime...

If I were you, I'd probably make a complete binary copy of the entire disk with dd, so you actually have something to work with in case the drive fails completely...

Anyway, I'm off to bed, and I suggest you do the same. You'll have a sharper mind after a good night's rest. :)

Download Hiren Boot CD:
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/files/Hirens.BootCD.14.0.zip

Boot it, select Run Mini-XP, there are bunch of very good recovery tools available that can scan the drive in R/O mode and get individual files (Recuva, etc)

The problem is Nao has never used Linux before (AFAIK) so I don't think it's going to be easy for him to use an Ubuntu live CD to recover data.

I definitely would suggest you to try with TestDisk as somebody else already said.

I have TestDisk installed in my Linux partition and it has been brilliant to recover data from all kind of different places (windows and linux partitions, etc. I even recovered with it data from a camera card that was really badly damaged).

And the good thing about TestDisk is that you don't need to have Linux installed. You can try it almost with anything.

I even saw once a stand alone CD with only TestDisk in it (done in DOS I think). Don't remember where it was, but suppose you can find it with Google.

Okay, a quick summary of what I lost and what I recovered...

Basically, I lost two hard drives for a total of 620GB of data. Maybe about 20GB were backed up all in all. Out of the unbacked data I'd managed to recover, most of the files are gibberish. I've lost all of my settings, as expected, I reckon it'll take me over a week just to get *functional* again for Wedge, and overall my morale has taken a very strong hit.

See, it's 4am here and I haven't done a SINGLE thing on Wedge today... A big "uh".

Here is a tutorial on how to recover data using Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

As you can see, they also recommend (among other programs) TestDisk.

Have you tried to recover any of the "gibberish" files using it?

As I said yesterday, a customer gave me last year a camara card (SSD formatted as FAT16 IIRC) that had been very badly damaged, asking me to do my best to recover anything from there.

All the programs that I tried gave me only a collection of binary gibberish data, not recognisable as any known file format.

Even Ontrack DataRecovery (that had done wonders for me in the past) couldn't get any sense about the data inside the card. Only saw gibberish as well.

That was when I started googleing to see how to do it with Ubuntu (up to 2 years ago I had used only windows and had no idea about how to use any linux system) and found out TestDisk.

That program not only recovered all the pictures my customer had inside the card. It even recovered old pictures he had no idea who had done (apparently they were done before he had formatted the card the first time years ago).

Since then I always use TestDisk first when a customer brings me a hard disk with lost partitions / files.

I don't get it -- how to recover a gibberish file... I don't see why this kind of recovery program has to suck that much in the UI department. Seriously, it's like the guy's having fun with our brains... (He's French, apparently. No wonder.)

Anyway...
I've only got this machine for a few days, and already I'm wondering whether I should be reinstalling everything again. Since I didn't get to install the OS by myself... It's just weird. In some areas, the machine is lightning fast as expected (the framerate for Fable III and Venetica is, like, 4 times faster.) In other areas... Uh???
Whenever I install a new program, it will spend literally *minutes* (the bigger the program, the longer) in the initial install phase (sometimes it says "gathering size data" or something, sometimes it just says "installing"), and then it'll install programs at light speed. But overall, it's like, twice slower to install than on my previous PC because of the initial startup delay... Uh.
I get crashes in Chrome. Yes, in Chrome. Global program crash, not just a single tab... Fun. I installed the dev channel version, so far it's more stable.
Opera uses its single thread at 100% CPU time. Resulting in a constant 13% CPU use (that's 1/8th of my CPU, since I have 4 cores + hyperthreading). Obviously it doesn't slow down the machine, but Opera itself is slower than on my XP... Ah ah. And when I restart Opera and wait for 10 minutes (it never reaches 100% use before a couple of hours, indicating a memory leak or something), scrolling is slow.
:edit: Oops, strike that. I'm using KatMouse to emulate the mouse wheel behavior in the Windows Explorer, and apparently it introduced a delay when scrolling the wheel. I just restarted KatMouse and it no longer does this... Add this to the LONG list of little oddities I found in Windows 7.

Generally, I find this Win7 to be LESS stable than my Windows XP... Which I installed in 2005, and never reinstalled -- so it was very slow because the registry was cluttered with unused data and all, but it wasn't... glitchy per se.

Other than that, it's great to have 8GB of ram... Being able to run my Opera (200 tabs), Chrome (50 tabs), Firefox (50 tabs) together without a single slowdown is just.. Wow!

:edit: KatMouse does its delay trick again after just a few seconds... Blah! I'll just need to look again for a similar program that dispatches mouse wheel actions to the window behind the mouse cursor... AlwaysMouseWheel just stops doing its magic after minutes, KatMouse does it but it adds this glitch... Uh.

Oh, and does anyone know a way to prevent Win7 from NOT saving data when a program is not run in Administrator mode? Or at least a way to run all programs in Admin mode automatically? Or at the very least, a way for Win7 to actually tell me it won't save the data I just wanted to save? There's nothing more frustration than realizing nothing was saved when I didn't get any error messages...

UAC does some validation on things that install into Program Files, usually when they're not cert-signed.That's odd to say the least. The only crashes I get in Chrome are specifically Flash related issues.Don't save stuff to Program Files, it's a protected folder. That said, you should be able to circumvent the problem if you turn off UAC but needless to say that's not recommended.

I always format windows if I get it pre-built or a laptop, and install everything myself. And also slap in a decent anti-virus to make sure I don't screw up.

So... I took a break to enjoy the power of my new machine -- played Fable III to the end, great mainstream game BTW (enjoyed the first one a lot, but this one was even better.)
In the meantime I did various tweaks to the setup. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied. Although I lost so many things, at least Explorer is usable now. I realized very quickly that Segoe UI, while okay for a web font, is not suitable at all for desktop use. I replaced it with PT Sans and guess what...? It's absolutely beautiful now.
I just can't figure out where to change the font in the taskbar... I guess I'll have to do without it. Everywhere else is a PT Sans party for me. By far the best everyday font I've ever used. It has a MacOS Chicago feel (mostly in the numbers and elegance), but is much more usable.

I still have several issues with the machine...
- Still getting long delays when it calculates the free space at the beginning of an install process,
- It doesn't refresh the explorer panes when I unzip a file somewhere. I either have to hit F5, or change folder and then come back to the previous one... Ouch.
- ClearType: can't get the exact setup I used to have... Possibly due to my XP install being run alongside Powerstrip with a higher alpha setting, while here I'm at the default alpha.
- And... That's pretty much all I can think of right now. So, overall I'm satisfied and I doubt I'll reinstall the machine... :)