I think I've had that week, and it started off on a bad note.
I had just gotten back from a three day lake trip and had a rather nice uncomfortable sunburn from not paying attention to my sunscreen. So, I get back have a day off before I have to return from work. The uncomfortable sunburn is just annoying, but no big deal.
I get up for work the next day, stop at the gas station, use my Visa/Debit card to fill up the tank, grab a sandwich for breakfast and head to work. Work is pretty sucky that day, its slow at quiet, too slow that I get bored. So, I hop onto my bank's website and pull up my account to see what the lake damage was. And my account is sitting at -$6. I freak out, and start scanning down the charges on the account. And there are multiple charges, all looking like this.
R.Okipnoi str., 3 KIYEV 0000 $-199.72
And when I say multiple, I mean MULTIPLE, not just one or two. I call up my bank and find out these are ATM Withdrawls made from Russia. Which is rather funny since my Visa/Debit card is in my wallet. So then take my card, cancel all access to the account, close the account out and open a new account for me. Problem is I'm broke and according to policy it takes up to 10 business days, so they kindly credit $100 to the new account.
My week is already bad, mild sunburn and some jerkoff in Russia made a fake ATM card and emptied my account.
It gets better, see I live 50 minutes from my work... two days later, I go outside and see that one of my tires is almost flat, I'm not happy with it, so I go digging for an air tank and its empty. Since I need to get to work, I drive on the partially flat tire to the gas station, hop out, air it up check the pressure, and take off for work. Halfway to work I realize something isn't right, and check my pocket. MY WALLET IS MISSING!!! I give up and turn around and head back to the gas station, in a panic I check around the air pump and no wallet, I ask the attendant, no wallet. At this point, I'm going to be 30+ minutes late, I figure what the hell and drive the 5 extra minutes to my house. And there laying on the ground next to the shed with the air tank, is my wallet. Its fallen open so my ID is grinning at me.
So.... I'm thinking worst week ever, sunburn is now almost gone, my account was cleared out by some jerk off, but the same day I "Lost" my wallet, they credited the stolen money back into my account.
But see, I was wrong. The week from hell wasn't done yet. Saturday I'm messing around with my computer, and it starts giving me read errors. So I reboot the system, it comes up, "Invalid Boot-disk" so I check the floppy and CD and take out my usb flash drive just in case, same thing. Rebooting repeatedly, same thing. Reboot off of my WinXP CD and it sees the Drive as 250GB of unpartitioned space. Just F'ing great.. just what I needed. I knew I shouldn't have bought the damned Maxtor drive. I've had it for 6 months and its already dying on me. So I power it off leave it for about 5 minutes, and boot it back up. Mysteriously it sees the windows partition and windows loads. However it can't see the other two partitions on the drive. (Before you ask, it was partitioned into 40gb = Windows/Misc. 100gb = New stuff and 100gb = backups of old 80gb drive). So, I'm starting to think I'm SOL. I run PowerMax on it, quick test tells me to run the extended and extended gives me an 16 digit error code (which btw the online RMA will only accept an 8 digit code!!).
I start looking for drive recovery tools (and I still am, if you have any pointers, please let me know). Searcing for tools, I find Zero Assumption Recovery, hey it'll recover 4 folders on the trial, so I figure what the hell I can get most of what I really want with just 4 folders. I install it, tell it to search for partitions. It finds the first one of course, 13% later it finds the second one, at 56% it finds the second partition. So I let it run, it gets to 98% completed on searching and slows down, it takes it another 45 minutes to get to 99%. I figure its found them and cancel out, so I tell it to scan the second partition, about 45 minutes later I've got a folder listing of the drive and recover my photos folder. I figure its cake, I'm going to be just fine. So I restart it, rescan, stop it at 57% and start trying to recover the third partition. Here is where it goes wrong, it gets to 98% of loading the partition and slows down, 45 minutes later it is at 99% and an hour later, my computer blue screens and locks up. So I reboot the system and try again, and the exact same problem occurs. I figure from the way it is having problems, the last 2% of the hard drive is damaged/unreadable and I need to find another tool to try to recover data from the last partition. So by now, I've gotten well over 8 hours invested in it and decide to call it a night.
So here I am at work, thinking wow... what a wonderful F'ing week. Sunburnt, bank account cleaned out, thought I lost my wallet, and my HDD has died on me.
So... anyone else had one of those weeks. Or anyone have any suggestions of free or good trial software for data recovery?
I had just gotten back from a three day lake trip and had a rather nice uncomfortable sunburn from not paying attention to my sunscreen. So, I get back have a day off before I have to return from work. The uncomfortable sunburn is just annoying, but no big deal.
I get up for work the next day, stop at the gas station, use my Visa/Debit card to fill up the tank, grab a sandwich for breakfast and head to work. Work is pretty sucky that day, its slow at quiet, too slow that I get bored. So, I hop onto my bank's website and pull up my account to see what the lake damage was. And my account is sitting at -$6. I freak out, and start scanning down the charges on the account. And there are multiple charges, all looking like this.
R.Okipnoi str., 3 KIYEV 0000 $-199.72
And when I say multiple, I mean MULTIPLE, not just one or two. I call up my bank and find out these are ATM Withdrawls made from Russia. Which is rather funny since my Visa/Debit card is in my wallet. So then take my card, cancel all access to the account, close the account out and open a new account for me. Problem is I'm broke and according to policy it takes up to 10 business days, so they kindly credit $100 to the new account.
My week is already bad, mild sunburn and some jerkoff in Russia made a fake ATM card and emptied my account.
It gets better, see I live 50 minutes from my work... two days later, I go outside and see that one of my tires is almost flat, I'm not happy with it, so I go digging for an air tank and its empty. Since I need to get to work, I drive on the partially flat tire to the gas station, hop out, air it up check the pressure, and take off for work. Halfway to work I realize something isn't right, and check my pocket. MY WALLET IS MISSING!!! I give up and turn around and head back to the gas station, in a panic I check around the air pump and no wallet, I ask the attendant, no wallet. At this point, I'm going to be 30+ minutes late, I figure what the hell and drive the 5 extra minutes to my house. And there laying on the ground next to the shed with the air tank, is my wallet. Its fallen open so my ID is grinning at me.
So.... I'm thinking worst week ever, sunburn is now almost gone, my account was cleared out by some jerk off, but the same day I "Lost" my wallet, they credited the stolen money back into my account.
But see, I was wrong. The week from hell wasn't done yet. Saturday I'm messing around with my computer, and it starts giving me read errors. So I reboot the system, it comes up, "Invalid Boot-disk" so I check the floppy and CD and take out my usb flash drive just in case, same thing. Rebooting repeatedly, same thing. Reboot off of my WinXP CD and it sees the Drive as 250GB of unpartitioned space. Just F'ing great.. just what I needed. I knew I shouldn't have bought the damned Maxtor drive. I've had it for 6 months and its already dying on me. So I power it off leave it for about 5 minutes, and boot it back up. Mysteriously it sees the windows partition and windows loads. However it can't see the other two partitions on the drive. (Before you ask, it was partitioned into 40gb = Windows/Misc. 100gb = New stuff and 100gb = backups of old 80gb drive). So, I'm starting to think I'm SOL. I run PowerMax on it, quick test tells me to run the extended and extended gives me an 16 digit error code (which btw the online RMA will only accept an 8 digit code!!).
I start looking for drive recovery tools (and I still am, if you have any pointers, please let me know). Searcing for tools, I find Zero Assumption Recovery, hey it'll recover 4 folders on the trial, so I figure what the hell I can get most of what I really want with just 4 folders. I install it, tell it to search for partitions. It finds the first one of course, 13% later it finds the second one, at 56% it finds the second partition. So I let it run, it gets to 98% completed on searching and slows down, it takes it another 45 minutes to get to 99%. I figure its found them and cancel out, so I tell it to scan the second partition, about 45 minutes later I've got a folder listing of the drive and recover my photos folder. I figure its cake, I'm going to be just fine. So I restart it, rescan, stop it at 57% and start trying to recover the third partition. Here is where it goes wrong, it gets to 98% of loading the partition and slows down, 45 minutes later it is at 99% and an hour later, my computer blue screens and locks up. So I reboot the system and try again, and the exact same problem occurs. I figure from the way it is having problems, the last 2% of the hard drive is damaged/unreadable and I need to find another tool to try to recover data from the last partition. So by now, I've gotten well over 8 hours invested in it and decide to call it a night.
So here I am at work, thinking wow... what a wonderful F'ing week. Sunburnt, bank account cleaned out, thought I lost my wallet, and my HDD has died on me.
So... anyone else had one of those weeks. Or anyone have any suggestions of free or good trial software for data recovery?
