schaggo Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 (edit: I hope I'm in the right forum category with this... If not, any Mod please move the topic... Thanks!) ...and all because of this Mac OS X x86 stuff! I thought it is a bad idea, I thought it... but here I go, hello satan! Usually I'm a hater of mass smilie posting but anybody in my mood is excused. Ok, here my story: Cool, found somewhere that OS X should finally (more or less) work with my HP nw8240, so why not give it a try? But at first, search and install some backup prog which can backup everything, including MBR and stuff. So - just in case OS X isn't that good yet - a 1-click-to-get-your-windows-back-feeling can come up. Found Altiris True Image 9 Home to do the job. So I let it rip my 80 gigs and smashed the image onto my 250 gig external disk. Started the rip before going to bed and next morning a 100% were reached. Cool. Checked the log for errors, no errors, rocks! Ok, now where is that OS X DVD...? Anyway, installed OS X and found it to rock! Sadly I couldn't get my Mobility Radeon x700 (well, FireGL V5000, but is based on a x700) to work nor the Broadcomm BCM5xxx whatsoever NetXtreme NIC. I don't even dare to talk of the Intel 2200 wireless stuff... Anyway, needed my windows back, at least for the moment. Searched for my 250 external, fired up the notebook, booted from the Altiris True Image emergency CD and long story short end: ...and very soon I found out that that goddarn friggin' dumba$s bloody prog didn't backup my drive some days earlier, it only created 13 empty files and a 14th of a mere 100 megs. SO WHERE IS THE REST OF MY 79,9 GIGS GONE...?!? To keep it short: lost all my photos (about 2 gigs), mp3 (quite a lot) and everything you usually have on a notebook. I know, should have checked the files before installing the new OS. But hey, seeing that there are 80 gigs in some files does nothing, so I trusted the LOG and there was nothing, not a single error, not a warning, nothing... Ok now, if anybody is still reading: be with me, give me your sympathy and cry some tears for me! Thanks. Uuhm... File recovery? Yeah, sure, but the first 5-10GB are lost, for sure, that's where OS X was and there is NOTHING left referring to my windows, for sure... And you know murphys law: I'm sure every single important document I had was stored in the first 5-10 gigs, so... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoMadMan Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 Dude, I feel ya. I wouldn't know what to do if I lost 10yrs of stored documents. I've read that some applications can scan your drive and recover deleted partitions. Have you tried that? I guess I feel safe enough that I have an ext. 80gig drive dedicated for file storage. I'd go nuts if the drive dropped dead one day. In my case, I guess the only real backup is a printout or RAID. I really hate burning then trying to locate files on stacks of CD's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schaggo Posted September 29, 2006 Author Share Posted September 29, 2006 Oh yes, I know several recoverers (www.runtime.org, www.quetek.com, ...) but as I mentioned (and already know since I tried some recoveries) many important documents I had on my desktop are gone. I guess because they were (physically) stored on the first few sectors of the HD. And yeah, there was stuff quite some years old... Oh boy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vandetta Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 I feel sorry for you, but then I think other than backup it on ext hardisk, you should burn it into dvd/cd also.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schaggo Posted September 29, 2006 Author Share Posted September 29, 2006 Well... 80GB would need (in my case) approximately 20 DVD's and that's a bit too much. Basically I did everything right, I let a (otherwise very respected!) program do a proper backup. No extra wishes, no strange option set, just a plane full-disk backup. For filesystem reasons (on FAT32 files have to be smaller than 4gb) it produces splitted images which is basically a very good idea. But I don't quite know why it only produced 13 empty files and 1 of about 100MB. Why, damn, why? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rammjet Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 I feel your pain, but sorry, no sympathy. If you planned to wipe out the hard drive containing all of your valuable files, you should have double, triple, quadruple-checked that your backup was good. Rather than saving it as 14 "ghost-like" files, you should have backed it up as a bootable installation to the external drive so you could boot it. Or at least be able to examine the individual files to be sure they were really there and could be copied back individually to a new installation if necessary. After all, the external drive could have held 3 full copies of your original installation. But wiping your installation should have been your last decision. First, how about trying to install OSX to the external drive? How about defragging your 80 GB Windows installation to free up 10-15 GB so you could create another partition on which to install OSX? Only after exhausting all other solutions should you have wiped your valued installation and as said before - be very sensitive about verifying your backup before even considering wiping the original. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mifki Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 you can still recover files even if theyve been written over, go get spinwrite and try that, it might take days but it will work Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schaggo Posted September 29, 2006 Author Share Posted September 29, 2006 I feel your pain, but sorry, no sympathy. (...) Hell yeah, you're right! I should have quadruplechecked everything. But I wasn't about to go on war with the FBI or whatever, I just wanted to give another OS a try and that's what I already did several times and never anything went wrong. I had about 15GB free, but those 15GB were simply 'outsourced' to the external drive. As soon as OS X would be gone I had to regain that space. So I thought backing up and then using the whole drive for OS X wouldn't harm. But yes, you're still right. I should have checked everything. I will in future, believe me... I will do backups on 5 different drives, send everything to gmail, additionally the new hotmail and burn it onto DVD and I don't know what else! Oh boy, I will. you can still recover files even if theyve been written over, go get spinwrite and try that, it might take days but it will work You mean SpinRite? Valuable answer. Thanks! Will give it a try... another 90$ going away for something which never should have taken place... Every 7 year old boy reading this: do backups and triplecheck them, for the rest of your life! Go to your dad and tell him you have my permission to go and get some drives to backup to... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quixos Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 don't feel too bad. terrorist EMP burst in 2008. you'ld have lost those photos anyway. PRINT! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacPhreek Posted September 29, 2006 Share Posted September 29, 2006 Thats ok, I deleted my music so I could install OSX. I never listen to it anyway. 45GB of music, GONE... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schaggo Posted September 29, 2006 Author Share Posted September 29, 2006 Well, ok, but for me OS X was just some kind of 'holiday trip' because I knew I can't be productive on it. I mean working without LAN/WLAN and decent graphics and most of the built-in gizmos of my notebook not working. And I actually listen to my albums, but I haven't got 45GB... Actually a question for Kiko: I read now several pages about SpinRite and I'm not quite sure it can help me. The (Windows) data I'm looking for has been overwritten with data from the Mac OS X installation. As far as I got it, SpinRite can possibly recover 'dead sectors' but it can't recover what has been overwritten. It performs so to say a good but completely different (let's say 'unneeded') job. Or am I completely wrong? By the way, I was able to regain control over several GB, mostly data which was stored on the second partition, which means a big part of my music collection, some imagefiles and pictures. But in fact I'm still missing the important data from my previous C: drive which was on my desktop, eg 'Documents and Settings'-folder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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