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May 2012

Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
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		HOLIDAYS
May 28 - Memorial Day

Guardian Angels
Kia Purity's Site
Surtur's Fuge of the Damned
Malachit Room
The Nisan Sanctuary

[Surtur]

So... I was using my computer as normal, left it for a bit, came back a couple hours later, and for some reason Firefox wouldn't load.  It was telling me I should reinstall it.  I didn't do that, but I tried opening another program, which also wouldn't load, and pressing ctrl+alt+del wasn't bringing up the task manager.  So I decided to reboot (which, I dunno, I probably shouldn't have done, I was already suspecting a virus).  On reboot, I got the message that windows couldn't start because the file "windows/system32/hal.dll" was missing or corrupted.  Looked up a bunch of possible solutions to this online (on another computer), tried them all, up until the suggestion to repair my windows installation via my XP cd.  Tried doing this, but when it got to detecting which of my partitions had windows installed, the one that should have had windows on it... didn't.  Moreover, it showed that all 40gb on that partition were free (ie., there was nothing on it).  The other partitions all looked normal (they had only as much free space as I expected them to).

So... it looks like that partition was totally wiped?  Grrarrggghhhhhh.  I still don't know if it was a virus or not, but it certainly seems like that was the case.  So at any rate, there aren't too many files on that drive I desperately need, but there are one or two that would be a major pain to lose - is it possible to do something like hook that drive up to my working computer and try to recover files off it?  I think there are programs that can look for deleted files and try to recover them, aren't there?  Or am I gonna have to take it in to some repair centre to try to salvage anything off it?  Or is it a completely lost cause?

Also, if I do hook it up to my other computer, considering that partition looks to be... empty now (sigh), is it possible the virus (assuming it was a virus) might still be on there?  Should I be worried about that?

Help!

[TheContact]

Honestly, it sounds like your harddrive died on you.  You should be able to maybe recover something... but that disk sounds bad.

[Surtur]

I have a second partition on that same drive that seems to be fine, though, it's just the c: drive that's empty.  Would that still be possible if the hdd just died?

Also, if the hdd has died, should I expect trouble getting anything off the partition that still looks fine (the one that still has files on it)?

[SLDFKnight]

Something like this happened to me a while ago. I was able to recover some of the stuff off of it by doing a clean windows install on a new hdd and hooking the broken one up as a slave. At least I think that's what I did.

[TheContact]

Yeah, just because your other partition works fine now doesn't mean that it's not about to stop working either.  Who knows how long you were running on borrowed time.

[Surtur]

Sigh.  So I guess I need to buy a new hdd, then.  But my mobo is so old, I don't know if it can connect to modern hdds (through sata or whatever they use now)... so I guess I need to buy a new mobo.  In which case, I should also probably get a new cpu.  In which case, I should probably just get a whole new fucking computergrararrrrghgghgh.

Something like this happened to me a while ago. I was able to recover some of the stuff off of it by doing a clean windows install on a new hdd and hooking the broken one up as a slave. At least I think that's what I did.

Yeah, that's kinda what I ended up doing.  I hooked up the drive as a slave to my other comp (with Windows on it) and d/l'ed like 500 recovery programs, none of which found anything, until R-Studio, which found everything (literally) with like no corruption, which is odd.  I guess it's a really good program?  Unfortunately, R-Studio isn't free, but the demo lets you recover files up to 64kb in size, which was enough for the important docs I needed to get off there.  Yay!

[kostjan]

ATA drives are still commonly sold just about everywhere.. They are also usually a notch cheaper than SATA ones..

[Surtur]

Yeah, I've found out about that, but my comp is so old by now, I think I should just take this opportunity to upgrade anyway, lol.