tephra: Photo portrait of a doll with shaggy, dark orange and copper hair, wearing a pink slouchy hat and sky blue glasses. (Default)
Tephra ([personal profile] tephra) wrote2006-12-24 05:31 pm
Entry tags:

WHOOHOO!!!

It's ALIVE!

[livejournal.com profile] hafoc, when faced with a crying Tephie at nearly 2am, managed to hunt down a bootable windows CD so I could try to recover my data.

More specifically, he found Bart's Preinstalled Environment. The PE Builder utility constructs a bootable Windows CD from your Windows installation CD (or in our case, the cab files that came on Bill's PC for the system restore function.)

I'll be writing a nice letter to Bart Lagerweij thanking him for making BartPE and putting it out there for those of us that aren't certified by Microsoft to have a copy of WindowsPE to do our own disaster recovery.

I booted up with BartPE and discovered that my C: drive was unreadable, the restore partition (D:) and my second drive (E:) were readable and intact but there was another local drive, labeled I:, that was unreachable. Obviously that was my C: drive.

I ran Check Disk and after marking 4 bad sectors and fixing the allocation table, viola! my PC booted up fine (though with a notable pause as it worked around the damaged area.)

So, next step, backing up all my data!

[identity profile] hafoc.livejournal.com 2006-12-24 11:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Unsolicited advice to any reader: It would be handy to do this for your machine BEFORE it dies.

I'm just glad that Windows XP files from one machine could successfully revive the other. Even though for legal and copyright reasons I had to shut down my machine while Teph was restoring hers, so that we wouldn't be using the same legally licenced version of Win XP on two machines at the same time. (heh heh)

[identity profile] toshirodragon.livejournal.com 2006-12-25 01:55 am (UTC)(link)
AWESOME! Give that man a gold star!!!

And LOTS of good food in the coming year!