Hate World. Hate Family. HATE SISTER!!!

:-x I have never been this pissed-off in my LIFE (and yes that includes that fucker who cut in front of me on a wet day when I had a bus riding my tail, so I of course crashed trying to avoid being run over and he fucking drove off!!).

My kid sister, who I am convinced is a spawn of Satan, was piss-farting around on my PC the other night. For those who don't know, the PC is my 'writing' computer.

She re-formatted the fucking hardrive.

"Caity, what does formatting a hard drive do?"
"It usually wipes everything and reconfigures what's left, I think. Why?"
"Because that's what your computer is doing."

Eight years of writing. Gone. EIGHT FUCKING YEARS.

I want to kill someone.

 

There are programs that can help you recover deleted stuff, you need to overwrite it about 10 times for it to be completely lost, so there's still hope.

I don't know what those programs are, and I bet they're pretty expensive, but try searching some tech forum, or I could later, and borrow them from a friend.

Try not to install anything on it in the meantime, the less you overwrite, the better.

AND ALWAYS KEEP BACKUPS OF IMPORTANT STUFF.

 

Uh... I've kind of spent the last week re-installing everything... Whoops.

 

It's probably not a too big problem, but don't do anything more until you find some program to restore stuff. Hopefully it can help you.

If the stuff is really important, try finding some company who recovers lost data. I believe some of them can do it even if you've set the disk on fire and stomped on it. It isn't cheap though.

 

Firstly, get another HDD with at least as much capacity as the old (windows needs some space, too, so the bigger is the better), you'll need it.
Secondly, get a hold of GetDataBack for FAT32 or NTFS, and recover as much as possible (check the files for validity!).
Thirdly, backup regularly.

 

It's not so much that it was important, it was the sheer volume of it all. Eight years compulsive writing does stack up after a while...

 

And kill that wannabe-nerd.

 

That reminds me of when I destroyed my dad's PC about eight years ago; he was a professional graphic artist at the time.
Well...I didn't destroy it so much as I caused some sort of fatal error that made the computer unable to recognise its own hard drive.
I still feel really bad about that, and during certain situations, I can't look my dad in the eye.

 

The thing with deleting files is it basically takes the pointers away and makes the file 'invisible' to you, but the data is still there. By disassociating the filenames and what not, it lets the HDD know it can overwrite those sectors. If you've just put windows back on, it hopefully should have just put itself back in the same exact location. Probably the same for explorer and other MS products that are bundled with it.

DONT put anything else on it. Like mathboy said, it'll take a few overwrites to completely nix it, but if its a text program its probably priority zero, and will be quickly overwritten. The data is still there though, and could probably be recovered word for word. Police forensics people do it all the time. There's also some off-the-shelf programs that are supposed to undelete files, never tried them though, which you could probably pick up for $30? Read the directions before installing though....
Good luck. aranoid:

And put nair in your sisters shampoo.

 

For that matter, it only signs the files as deleted

Anyway, here's the program I have talked about: http://uran.extra.hu/tmp/gdb.zip

 

*hugs Xiao*

I can sorta relate to your feelings. When I was a child, I used to write short stories, spooky tales, and my teachers used to keep them. They never gave them back, and I didn't have extra copies. That's so frustrating.

 

I have an idea! Roll back to a previous "date" using windows system recovery. Everything that existed during that time should be present when you've successfully gone back.
If not, do that thing Maximus had said.

 

To my knowledge, it can only handle changes in registry.
---
I already had such an accident (during Win98 installation, Windows tought FAT32 is not equal to FAT32 and began to convert the filesystem), and GetDataBack helped.
Caity, borrow a HDD from somebody (with free space >= your data), and do the restore. You can't lose anything.

Edit: great, I have just discovered a bug in phpBB.

 

It does handle changes in registry, but I had found certain things that I thought deleted back where they used to be after my most recent roll back. This may be completly unrelated, however.

 

No. She wants to do it herself. You may have to cover up the "accident" though.

 

I do have some ninja-spiders avaible at the moment... And considering what's just happened, you can borrow them for free.

 

I dont care how she does it BUT NO NINJA SPIDERS!

 

I could eat her. You know, if you wanted me to.