Sunday (or Tuesday???) helper

Welcome to our little helping section. OK, sunday is more than over now. Did you have a great easter? Mine was partially not so good, which brings me to this post. I really made a big mistake this weekend. I wanted to format my MP3 player but in a careless moment I did not realise that I'm on the way to format my HD and so I lost all my data, pics, kits, etc, oh my gosh!!!

OK, now you say, why don't you have a backup? Well, sure I have a backup on a second HD, but I don't know what went wrong on this day. I wanted to access my backup but the HD told me, I have to format, what I did not. First I used a little helper called testdisk to recreate the HD's boot sector, but now Windows told me, that my HD also lost the file system, so I used chkdesk (it's a windows tool) to recreate this. Finally I could access my HD again, but shock, there were only a few files left. Now I had two HD's without any data. I really wanted to cry, mostly because of my pics.

I tried different recovery programs but most of them were going to scan the HD for days and hang off short after starting. But then my hubby found a really useful program called R-Linux. You can get it for both platforms, windows and linux. As a have a windows PC I used this version. R-Linux took about 2 days to scan my 3 TB HD but it really found a mass of files, even my lost pics and I could recover them all to a different HD. I'm really happy now and perhaps someone of you has a similar problem and this thread will help you in your disaster.

Have a great week!