Well it finally happened. My kids all got the flu. One decided to take a TV into her room. The other had a vaporizer and decided to plug in a space heater as well. I was running chkdsk when, pop! the breaker blew. I turned things off and reset the breaker, then I rebooted. Everything came up and the bios found my hard drives then the progress bar showed up, got about two clicks along, and hung. I rebooted again, same thing. I pressed delete and changed the bios and saved. It booted to the same place then jammed. I ran a boot disk and chkdsk. It immediately started turning up errors. I could never get past step 2 of 5. Now I have a 200mb drive with two partitions. I've completely reinstalled windows and most of my software. The good news is my Bryce files were on a second partition on the old drive and I have recovered all of them with the exception of a christmas thing I have somewhere else. The bad news is the last year of my other stuff including all my documents and about 40 albums I ripped to MP3 are on the other partition. Does anyone have a favorite recovery program to recommend? I've had norton 3 2000, 2001, 2003 system works. I think norton recover faded about 2001 in favor of the disk image and protected file recycle bin thing. I don't have 2005 yet so now's the time to buy it or something else if it's better. This is an NTFS format by the way.

If you have two computers, it's a cinch. I had to do this for a friend just today. He got a nasty boot-sector virus. I took his hard drive out, put it in a firewire/USB external drive enclosure, and copied his crucial files onto my computer(after an AV scan of his drive) and then burned him a DVD copy. I would just put his hard drive on my hard drive cable(after setting the HD jumper position to slave)to copy files, but I didn't have room in my dinky 'lil Dell(It was a gift OK?) Then I did a low-level re-format and a re-install of his OS, programs files, and his backup files. Works great now, and it got rid of his file fragments too. I know there are prob easier ways to do this, but I had the hard-drive case and it seemed like a good use.

My solution? Kill the kids....;-) ...well....at least ground them for a month or so........

I have two drives. My problem is it scragged the fat. I can't get a directory listing in windows or dos. I need a program that can track down the first block, find the other blocks and rescue what it can. I can undelete the damaged partition on the disk onto a fresh partition on the new one so I won't be writing over other data as I rescue.

[[ My solution? Kill the kids....;-) ...well....at least ground them for a month or so........]] That takes one of those 3-pronged plugs, right? ;o)

Attached Link: http://www.knoppix.org/

I now have a CD-bootable version of Knoppix (Cut down version of Linux) which let me transfer all my files (the ones I wanted) to a second drive and then reformat. I recommend EVERYONE have a copy of it. Saved me mucho heartache.

Probably wouldn't help if the FAT is shafted though. But certainly worth a try.

It even comes with a few games and word processor etc. If Bryce ran on it, I'd scrap Windows.

Here's the officail write up (I'm not on commission)

KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

Attached Link: http://www.grc.com

I don't have anything flash. I have Norton Ghost 2003, stupid thing is i haven't installed it or Norton Internet Security 2004 on this computer since i have had it upgraded :/

Thanks to everyone! I will read up and see what will work best. ( Killing the kids is not an option, there's just too much paperwork involved! Plus, I have to pay disposal costs)

;-)

don't know if this still works, but it used to be that there were 2 copies of the FAT tables (if you're still on FAT, and not NTFS, or some other scheme). Go to DOS, and try c:fdisk /mbr (master boot record). Norton used to be able to use the other copy to clean up the original, though it's been quite awhile since I've had to do this. Do you have a recovery disk, if a later OS?