I have a Dell5150 and I'm running XP. I bought a IOGear 250GB hdd. I put all sorts of files on it. Then one day I try and use it, it tells me that the drive is not formatted and asks to reformat now. I've not yet reformatted it. Upon start up Windows says "File record segment #### is unreadable" Then it tries to fix it but it doesn't work.

So I tried using an R-Studio demo I found to recover the files I lost. It then can't recover them because "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." Does anyone have a guess or a clue?

I lost pictures which are very valuable to me.

Do you have a linux machine?

Can you put one together with some old pc parts?

It is possible to mount the drive on linux box and use vfat fsck tools and repair the drive at least to get the pics off.

I am linux guru and can walk you through the steps. But you have to come up with the hardware.

Put Debian on a box and get back to me.

Hello,

Danger! If he formatted the drive using NTFS, then the VFAT tools may damage what is left. I think he woul d be better advised to take the drive to another windoze machine (XP or 2K) and hook it up there.

But if the data is as valuable as he claims, he would have backups of it, ready to go. And if he doesn't have backups, I am willing to bet once he has it restored, that he will be looking into a backup strategy so this doesn't eat him again.

Christian

NO DANGER....

He can mount the drive NTFS under linux as well...

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