My dad defragmented my Windows system drive recently, then I noticed that the computer was going really slow, but there was no big process running. So I restarted my computer, and after the bios, it couldn't load into windows!!!

There was no access to any operating system at that point, not even my linux, so there was no non-really-really-difficult way to backup my Data drive... We called the Dell techinicians, and they tried to help, but in the end we still had to reinstall windows. So, I formatted my C Drive and installed windows on it (The formatting part took like 7 hours ). Finally, we got Windows back, but we couldn't access the D Drive because windows says that it is raw. The Dell techinicians said that when I installed windows on C, it would automatically format D drive too. Is that true? Anyway, the main question is how can I recover my files on the D drive? Can the files be still in their directories when I get them back? Can I just tell Windows to recognize it as formatted?

Looks like u've got a hard disk problem on your hands. Try using some data recovery software's. If it still doesnt work then u may probably have to replace your hard disk. Your system may work fine now but it would get screwed up again later. I know this out of experience. Just that the formatting took 7 hours proves this. My advice "Better safe than sorry".

Just because it saya that it is raw, doesn't mean that the drvie was reformated, it just means that windows doesn't know haow to read it.

Read this:
Disaster Recovery.

Hopefully it will help.

I have one concern. You said that formating the HDD took seven hours.
Even with a large HDD, it shouldn't have taken so long with a quick formate.
This leads me to belive that a full formate was done. If so, then zeros were written to the HDD. Basically erasing all data. See, deleteing a file and even quick reformating just tells the registery that the space used by that data is available. And even writing over the data doesn't completely erase it. Writting zeros to the drive is a little more thorough. It may have destroyed everything and you may not get it back.

Goog Luck.

vujsa

A program that helped me alot was PCI file recovery, I accidently nuked the partition table of my HDD (which of course i didn't backup). And i couldn't afford losing the stuff on it, so I did a quick google and found PCI, it works very well. And is fast too

Hmm, I've read that article of yours, vujsa, even replied to it. But I didn't know Windows could ignore my D drive after a new install... And yes, I did do the full format only for C drive. Do you know of any way to make Windows recognize D's format? I thought the techinician was wrong, too, when he said that Windows automatically formats the D drive too.

Jipman, I'm searching for PCI now...

This post has been edited by szupie: Apr 8 2005, 08:44 AM

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

You can find it here

Ok, found it. It's the only freeware for recovery I've came upon, and it's also the only one that lets me see a preview of my D drive. I've tried EasyRecovery Professional Trial and Recover My Files before, those didn't work too well, especially EasyRecovery.
I always get this NT_read error when I use PC Inspector to search my D drive, saying

error no.23
drv:128 LBA:27389278 blocks:8

Abort, Retry or Ignore?


Everytime I click any of the 3 buttons, the dialog closes, PCI pauses for a few seconds, then the dialog pops up again. I'd have to close the whole PCI to stop it from popping up again. Anyone know what's wrong? The error no., drv and blocks never change, but the value of LBA changes slightly.

Sounds like to me its some kind of hardware porblem.
7 hours to format a hard disk !!! it takes a boot 7 tenths of a second to format my IDE 80 gig disk.

It might be helpfull if you get a print out of your partiton table (with fdisk) and post that here.
Somtimes i have loads of truble with windows and partitons, and it works woneders to check and correct the partitton type code to a windows value (vfat or ntfs, cant remember the code number)

How do I use fdisk? I have Windows XP. (sorry for the short post.)

OK, I have given up trying to recover my 3d and flash works... I've used multiple programs to get my files back, but none of them could successfully give me my 3ds max files, and none of them even know what a flash file is. I tried to use Recover My Files to find my 3d files, but it took more than 72 hours to scan less than half of my D drive, and my computer frequently went down in the middle of scans, making me have to restart the scan again. I found most of my other less important files with EasyRecovery Pro. It's an ok program...

Well, I guess I'd have to be more careful with my files in the future... I must frequently back up.