HP desktop hard drive died

[billd766]

1 hour ago, chrisinth said:

Bill, dependant on the type of recovery your guy did (and transferred to a seperate external), when you plug the external into your computer you should see folders such as .trash, .recovered, root, etc. Expand root and you should see something like Local disk 1, Local disk 2 (this will depend on what sort of backup you did and how many partitions were backed up).

Expand these folders and you should see your recovered files.

Edit: On the recovered external there may be a folder titled with just numbers; explore this as well. You won't break anything by just looking.

If you can, could you make a snapshot of the recovered external and post it here?

 

 

This is what I can see.

 

 

data information.doc

[chrisinth]

2 hours ago, billd766 said:

 

This is what I can see.

 

 

data information.doc

 

Hi Bill,

OK, it looks as if your data is in the image f6bb5ff9-4261-11e5-8b89-806e6f6e6963 as it appears to be about 180 GB in size (191,306,75x kb).

The image, f6bb5ff6-4261-11e5-8b89-806e6f6e6963 looks to be about 808 Mb (827,392 kb).

 

You need to read the Open Office document BackupSpecs to see which program the image was taken with so you can run that program to see what you have got.

 

Hopefully someone on here may recognise the image titles; it may be the MS backup tool that was used but I'm not sure. I'm surprised your guy didn't decompress these folders for you; but possibly too large for the external used to transfer??

 

The good news is that you should have your data back.............................

Edited October 30, 2016 by chrisinth

[guzzi850m2]

I back-up my photos to Flickr which is free.

 

So I have over 10.000 photos there now, somewhere in cyberspace. It took me over 2 month to do as my upload speed is dead slow compared to download speed, keeping my desktop PC running during the nights to speed things up. 

Okay this Flickr is not 100% secure, nothing is, heard about some people that lost all their photos there so having a couple of hard-drives with your most important stuff backed-up there as well is a very good idea but don't keep them in the same place if your house burns down, put one is a bank safe somewhere if you really care about the photos, or you can put them on your Facebook timeline but everybody will have access to them.

[billd766]

2 minutes ago, guzzi850m2 said:

I back-up my photos to Flickr which is free.

 

So I have over 10.000 photos there now, somewhere in cyberspace. It took me over 2 month to do as my upload speed is dead slow compared to download speed, keeping my desktop PC running during the nights to speed things up. 

Okay this Flickr is not 100% secure, nothing is, heard about some people that lost all their photos there so having a couple of hard-drives with your most important stuff backed-up there as well is a very good idea but don't keep them in the same place if your house burns down, put one is a bank safe somewhere if you really care about the photos, or you can put them on your Facebook timeline but everybody will have access to them.

 

Hopefully I can get my data back and when I get a second 1Tb external HDD I can store my stuff on each one rotating every week perhaps. I also have a fireproof safe in the house so I could keep one in there every time I do a backup.

[billd766]

1 hour ago, chrisinth said:

 

Hi Bill,

OK, it looks as if your data is in the image f6bb5ff9-4261-11e5-8b89-806e6f6e6963 as it appears to be about 180 GB in size (191,306,75x kb).

The image, f6bb5ff6-4261-11e5-8b89-806e6f6e6963 looks to be about 808 Mb (827,392 kb).

 

You need to read the Open Office document BackupSpecs to see which program the image was taken with so you can run that program to see what you have got.

 

Hopefully someone on here may recognise the image titles; it may be the MS backup tool that was used but I'm not sure. I'm surprised your guy didn't decompress these folders for you; but possibly too large for the external used to transfer??

 

The good news is that you should have your data back.............................

 

There wasn't enough room left on the HDD to decompress and store the folders as well and I should be able to get them back. This is why I need another external HDD so that I can dump those files to it  and fool the windows image backup into believing that it is a real PC. Alternatively  I can try different recovery programs to get the data back.

[brianinbangkok]

 
There wasn't enough room left on the HDD to decompress and store the folders as well and I should be able to get them back. This is why I need another external HDD so that I can dump those files to it  and fool the windows image backup into believing that it is a real PC. Alternatively  I can try different recovery programs to get the data back.

Before you know you may mess things up if your not sure what your doing.

Buy a bigger drive.

Get your guy to decompress the data on it for you.

[JetsetBkk]

On Sunday, October 30, 2016 at 5:41 PM, billd766 said:

 

There wasn't enough room left on the HDD to decompress and store the folders as well and I should be able to get them back. This is why I need another external HDD so that I can dump those files to it  and fool the windows image backup into believing that it is a real PC. Alternatively  I can try different recovery programs to get the data back.

 

Update: Bill copied the WindowsImageBackup folder to a new external drive. I connected to his PC via TeamViewer and mounted the two image files (.vhdx files) by opening Disk Management and assigning a drive letter to them.

 

Unfortunately neither contains his missing pictures - one contained his system partition with his profile data, and the other contained a folder called FDOS.

 

So now he is looking at getting the drive with the faulty head (and his pictures) repaired, maybe in Bangkok, maybe in Singapore.

 

Updates to follow.