Maybe all of you had such a bad day before ... uhm ... not easy to speak at the moment :o(: OK - the facts: The HD of my Poser-PC died ... Yes - all Poser-files were on that PC - also the zipped ones ... NO - there weren't a real backup ... I don't know when I would be able to do a new pose of the week ... The first thing I might have to do now is to contact DAZ for a (possible) backup from the files I have from them ... Oh geeez - please noone remind me of all the Poses-files I had on this PC ... it will be a sleepless night it seems ... If anyone of you knows of a good data-rescue-company in Germany or near arround that - I would be happy to hear about it ... That's all for the moment ... Thank you for understanding ... sorry ... geeeeeeeeeeez btw: Did anyone have saved all the poses from 3dCommune I did ?? I would be happy to have them back ... thank you also :o(

I'm so sorry! You sure put my computer woes into perspective. You're certainly welcome to any of your wonderful poses that I have.....With all the folks here who have been collecting your work for so long, I really believe that you'll (eventually) recoup everything that you had released. If there was new, unreleased material there, though, we'd all better just have a moment of silence for them! (((((HUGs)))))

Well you know what they say, "there is no use crying over spilt milk." I had the same problem a couple of months ago I lost everything on my home PC, and I had to rebuild my poser library, how did I solve this you ask? well I had to shell out some cash (about $300 dollars) and purcased an external portable hard drive, with 120 Gigs of space, now if my computer goes south again all my files are safe.

Yes ... of course there is no crying over ... etc ... only around 10 GByte of unused Poser-files I never had the chance to look at ... only around 200 or 300 never released poses (OK - that's not so much) only one really cleaned up Poser - directory oh - I'm happy I'm to tired to harm myself at the moment ... :o( for the datarescue - yeah ... I would pay around $ 500 or so - but not more ... well - let's face it ... maybe it gives me back some time ... when I downloaded all again ... it's the chance to clean up the download - mess ... the only problem is - don't expect new poses soon ... :o(

Tell me what happened, maybe I can help

kawecki ... I'm now on chat ...

well ... seems I missed ya ... however ... it says: Searching for Boot Record from IDE-0..OK Error bye reading of the HD (translated into English) reboot with strg+alt+entf ...

Which Windows do you use? How many disks have you in this Pc Which is the size of the HD How many partitions it has (drivers, C:,D:,E:,etc)

tis may be worth a try but only try this if you are not going to go for the data recovery! boot from a win95 startup disk etc down to DOS run FDisk c: /MBR this rebuilds the Master Boot Record.. BUT! it's not supported or even listed! tis a last resort... I to have some of your files I've downloaded.. so I offer my help to replace them...

Don't count the drive out yet. I've had machines give that message then wake up a few tries later. One machine I know gave that message on and off for months before the people finally got around to replacing the drive. They didn't lose a thing. You might look around for a few local pc repair places. One may be able to replace the drive and save the data at the same time.

What you can do is: 1) Don't use the disk any more, don't touch it, disconect it 2) Put a new HD in your PC 3) Install Windows 98 (custom instalation without all items) on your new disk 4) Install Norton Utilities 5) It will be good if you can install some Power Quest software, I don't know the name, but is one can can make images of the winchester. 6) Install you old HD as slave 7) Try to make an image of your failed disk 8) Run Norton's Disk Doctor, maybe it can repair it. Save the undo's

Attached Link: http://www.ontrack.de/easyrecovery/

tut mir leid, was Dir passiert ist :-(.

Die Software Easy Recovery kann ich Dir empfehlen, habe ich selber ausprobiert, nachdem wir unseren neuen PC eingerichtet hatten, stliche (wie ich dachte) Daten vom alten auf den neuen PC erspielt hatten und mein Mann dann die Festplatte vom alten PC formatierte.

Easy Recovery hat alle Daten wiederhergestellt und das Programm lst sich ganz einfach handhaben.

Es gibt auf der Seite von Ontrack.de eine Trial zum downloaden, mit der Du Dir die verschwundenen Dateien auf der Festplatte anzeigen lassen kannst. Du kannst auch bei Ontrack anrufen, Telefonnummern stehen auf der Seite (ist alles in deutsch).

Wsch Dir viel Glk, hoffentlich kannst Du Deine Daten retten!

Friederike

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

Oh, nu-be, just looked at your post above. yeah, the in house recovery is very expensive. I looked into that as well as a company in San Diego. Any lab will be expensive and they use the same recovery programs that you can get. Like I said, check out the recovery software they sell at the site or use the one that comes with the FixIt CD. As for the /mbr stuff, been there done that, OnTrack was so much faster, easier, and didn't cause any more damage. The hard part will be getting the drive to spin. That's what the labs are for. If you just have something like a blown partition or the boot record was blown, then OnTrack software will do the job for you. Norton really can't handle the hard core jobs. The new PowerQuest Partition Magic is supposed to recover certain kinds of failures, but I haven't tested that portion of the program yet. Ok, best wishes for you. Like I said, I was successful in recovering from a blown NTFS partition with OnTrack and it handles just about any kind of failure as long as you can get your drive to spin.

I may be really sticking my foot in my mouth here, but wouldn't the pose files at 3D Commune and DAZ still be on their server, and wouldn't the pose files on your own site be on that server? Why can't you just re-download or FTP them to your new HD? You could at least recover those, and I assume you have backups to your two commercial CDs?

Do what Kawecki said. you might be able to access the files from an installed hard drive with windows in it and slaving the bad drive. also check your data cabels. mine get loose sometimes and give me those errors. I have to replug them in when that happens.

Did you try replacing the cable, or re-attaching it (mine for reasons unknown must be re-attached every so often to make it work)?? Also in Bios, change from auto-detect to manual detect. In my VERY LIMITED expericence with Hard drive problems, these were the fixes.

Oh my, how awful, well if you got anything from us, you let us know we can replace it for you right away, hang in there, there is always tomorrow. Sharen

Let me know if there's anything I can do. I had downloaded any of your poses that I could fine, including some from 3D Commune. Of course, I have the Captured Moments CD, but I imagine you've already got that covered. I'd need to go over a few cd's to put the stuff together, but I'd be glad to help. I have a CD burner, and have saved your stuff to be safe. I can make a CD for you too.

If your hard drive will still spin up, there is a software you can get over the Interner for around $50 that will allow you to recover 90% of your bad drive. My HD crashed this past January and I was sick, 'cuz my family photo album was on it with no backup. Found this program that will read the bad drive as long as it will still spin up. Was able to save everything but the saved E-Mails. E-Mail me at: el_jefe52@hotmail.com, or robin@ballardcos.com and I will send you the information that you need. Hope this will help you out. I've had to use OnTrack in the past to recover HDs for clients and they are fantastic. But, I'm just glad I was able to recover my files without having to pay their prices. Robin

I remember seeing on the Daz site that they will burn you a backup CD-ROM of everything that they have you on record of buying for $10.00

Such sad news indeed. I do have just about all the 3DCommune weekly poses, however I did rename the zips so I can tell them apart (not the pz2 themselfs) and didn't keep the hair poses as my HD is tiny and I usually use diffent hair anyway. But I would be glad to send any that you find others can retrieve that I may have. Hang in there Schlabber, you are king, you are mighty, you shall overcome all!!

Few days ago, when I was running one of my Pcs, a kitty enter inside it and started to play with the cables. I turned off the power at the moment, but was too late. My primary HD had the boot and master boot records overwritten. I had to manualy create the partitions by trial and error, then copied from another HD the boot record, then I must locate in which sector the first and secont FAT and directory begins. Then edited the boot with these information. Norton's Disk Doctor did the remainding job. I didn't lost anything in the HD, after 5 exhausting hours of work, and the cat continue playing, she doesn't matter on my sufferings.........

Schlabber; Here is a little tip that may help. I had a friend who's system blew a controller chip, and essentially destroyed the boot sector of her hard drive. On a lark, I connected the drive, booted Windows 98SE, and found that the drive existed in Control Panel-System-Device manager, although it wasn't present in My Computer. IF this is the case for your drive, then right click on it, and check the box that identifies it as a removable drive. You will need to reboot at that point, but if the FAT table is intact, you should be able to read the drive. Removable drives are considered 'non bootable', so all that is looked at is the FAT table and actual data. Good Luck!

Schlabber, lots of tips here in this thread. Dunno if you're using a partition or not or NTFS/FAT/FAT32 format, etc. If you would be so kind as to post some more detail we could narrow it down. A blown partition, overwritten boot sector, bad sector on the HD, or any number of things could cause the error that you reported. As long as she spinns up, there are ways to fix it. If it doesn't spin up, then there are still ways, just that the price goes up. I've recovered from just about every failure you can think of on just about every windows format system that you can think of. So have others here. Post some specific info and we can steer you towards the right way to fix this. Reconstructing the HD from DAZ and the marketplace here, etc, won't work for your "in process" files. You need to get that recovered.

thank you all ... I'll read through all of this later - have to go to work now ... OK - so much for the bad news ... now for the good ... I think I can backup almost 95% - in the first panic I forgot about to repair a HD ... W2K did a good job (I think) by running this and that maintenance routine (it arranged - rearranged files etc the whole night - as I can see from the file-system I lost around 500 MByte 'cause of damaged sectors (well a headcrash even) - but it seems that's mainly in the Windows-System folder (good to know 'cause THAT's replaceable ...) - it seems I can save a lot - but first I have to buy another HD (you can believe me I'll touch the damaged one only again only for copying over to another HD). So far so good ... I hope it won't be that much I've lost ... :o( once again ... thank you Bye Schlabber

As unfortunate as it is, this should be a reminder to everybody to back-up. I purchased an external USB 40GB hard disk which's sole purpose is to back-up my poser and Vue folders. Bad luck Schlabber, I hope you get it all back. best wishes Jody

Every time I read about such an experience, I'm thankful for my stack of blank CD's, CD Burner, and good backup program.

When my drive died I used a program called "lost+found" to recover lots of my data, I dumped it to zip disks, but if it ever happed again, I'd buy a second disk and just stream the data from one to the other. later jb

I have ME and 2K dual boot on the same partition (I know, its a no no, but it saves space by being able to run programs to the same directory). I stayed with Fat obviously. Lotsa folks use NT without realizing it just by having w2k.

well - I had a Bootsection ... so /mbr (make boot record) won't help ... However - last night I went through a lot of saving options and I think I can backup 98% - that's pretty much - especially as it seems only full files are gone (in worst case only a few bits of a file could have been corrupted - this would have ended than really in a mess). Now only 2 folders are missing (in the backup - routine) and I have secured almost everything on another HD (around 40 GByte) It seems the error was in the beginning of the Harddisc - 'cause mostly Windows-files are corrupted ... Well - what to say - as I had to buy 2 (yes, 2 - 'cause one for the RAID) new Harddisc I do have now a security HD (I can use the old 2nd one of the RAID). And well - this system ran for almost a year - it was time for setting up a new system :o). Uhm - finally it seems I was able to come over it with a blue eye ...

:) :) :)

well - don't remember also - it could've been also master boot record - it's a long time ago :o)