Vaio zoinked..

Finally I'm back online on my lappie. Been struggling for about 24 hours (cummulative). What happened? I killed the windows partitions on my primary sata hdd. How did tht happen? Erm.. blush*. Do I really wanna embarass myself further?

I was supposed to be gaming, instead I decided to seek some knowledge. So I booted to linux via external usb hdd and decided to configure the wireless modem. Had been wanting to do tht for ovr a mth now. I screwed the libraries up, so the easy way out would be to reinstall linux. I've been messing with linux since 2nd year of college. 8 years of so called experience got the better of me. The installation went on like a charm. Till I wanted to log back into windows did I realise the inevitable.. I zoinked the MBR of the windows hdd.

Fine, been there done tht solved it, piece of cake. This time I got a lil adventurous and tried a new 'style' of recovering the MBR. I did "dd if=/dev/zero of /dev/sda bs=512" from linux. In theory tht should work so I thought. Tht on it's own somehow, zoinked all partitions on /dev/sda which was where windows was installed.

Me heart slumped down south till it reached my groins. What flashed by:

1. Photos
2. Blog material
3. Data
4. Saved Game data, I've been playing Jade Empire for the past week
5. PHOTOS! JPEG! MRW! DNG! PSD!
6. pHoTos!
7. PhOtOs!
8. Movies! (of all sorts of coz ahem*)
9. Bookmarks, all those hours of surfing.

Steady.. I turned off me notebook and went to sleep haha! Laughter the best medicine? I would rank sleep the 2nd.

Ok on /dev/sda I had 2 partitions. The first was where the OS was installed with saved data of sorts. The second was where my prized photos were archieved and my downloads.

Why can't I recover the lost data? After all it was a mere partition f*ck up. Assumingly the 1st partition would be from the early sectors of the hdd till somewhere in the middle with the 2nd partition taking on from there till the end of the disc.

I then recreated a partition of 4096000 (40GB), formatted it and lef the rest of the hdd unpartitioned. Installed windows and used GetDataBack (GDB). Somehow GDB was unable to sweep unpartitioned space. So I created another partition with what was left. I did not format this new partition. Said some silent prayers and reran GDB.

Voila! GDB managed to recover all the data which was sitting on me 2nd partition! Well as of now, I've only checked the JPEGs and some installation files. In time I'll check the RAW (from my Dynax 5D) files as I'm yet to install Adobe Lightroom. Since there's some uncertainty of the quality of the recovery, I'll be leaving this partition unformatted until I've verified most of the files. If the files are more corrupt than useful, then I'd try using another recovery software.

I managed to save:

1. Photos (JPEG)
2. Movies

The accuracy of recovery softwares greatly depend on the built in algorithms. It's rumoured some fair better in mp3 recovery and so on.

Right now, I'm connected to windows update downloading the numerous amount of patches and updates. A whole 78 of em! Estimated time, 1 hour 10 mins.

Oh boy, a long and tiring journey lays ahead. Would take me hours to bring this baby back to it's former self.. with lots of lost data..