Well lately my laptop has been giving me a bit of a fit. Adding/Removing programs would cause a blue screen of death for instance. Its an Averatec laptop, 17" screen, AMD 1.8 ghz processor, 1.5 gb DDR, 80 gig HDD, etc, etc.
Well I use it a lot for my business and do all my invoicing and inventory and stuff like that on it. I have to external drives that I use to back up stuff to. A maxtor 120gb portable USB drive and a Seagate 250 gb USB portable desktop drive.
Over the weekend I had a few more issues with the blue screens so I decided to back up everything and reformat the drive and start clean. So I backed up all my invoicing and inventory stuff to the Seagate drive. Also included in the back up wall all of my Grand Prix how to's information, documents, electrical stuff, you name it. About 5 - 6 gigs of stuff in that alone. As well was all my stuff for the GPF screensaver, my email, etc. You name it, it was backed up on that drive.
Well, I didnt realize it or either didnt give it much thought but the Seagate drive was left connected to my USB port.
So I formated the drive and because I had a partition on my laptop drive, one NTFS and one FAT32 I had to break out my Linux stuff and use Parted Magic to clear the partition and unify the drive.
Well in none of this work did ever the Seagate drive show up so I know for FACT I never touched that drive in any of the formatting or the removing of the partition on the laptop drive.
So I get windows loaded back up and probably two hours or better later all of the windows update done (on high speed no less). So I hook the Seagate drive back up, I hear the computer recognize the connection and I see the little balloon messages pop up saying its a mass storage device and so on. But nothing shows up in Windows Explorer.
Well I go to computer properties and then manage, where you can set drive letters and stuff like that. Well the drive is there, its given the letter E but its not showing up in explorer. Well one thing leads to another and I finally get it to show up in explorer. I click on the drive and its telling me the drive needs to be formatted, it doesnt recognize the file structure. Which of course I dont do.
I try the wifes laptop, same thing. I hook it up to my desktop PC, same thing. So somehow, I have no clue how, but it seems the drive has either been corrupted or something. I did finally get a glimpse at what file structure it has and its showing as RAW, as opposed to FAT32, NTFS, etc.
Well, that hard drive has TONS of critical stuff I need, not the least of which is all my invoicing stuff. Fortunately I printed out all the reports and stuff I need for the 2007 year so I can get the taxes done, but I still need all that data back along with everything else.
So, are there any computer experts out there that can suggest something I can use? I prefer open source software or at least free, but if I must, I'll buy a commercial solution, though not my preference.
I have really got to get the data off that drive, so any help would be much appreciated.
