MinJungKim.com Braindump v 6.0 Gah. I’m still doing this?

Nicknames

My father’s fondest nickname for me as a child was “troublemaker”.
Why? Because of my uncanny ability to break anything and everything.
If the tv was on the fritz, I’d walked past it. The phone not working? I’d touched it. The rice burnt? I’d hit a button too much.

Mosty it was because I had *just* enough knowledge to know how to take things apart (toasters, eye glasses, watches, small woodland creatures) and too short of a term memory to remember how to put the pieces back together. (Poor bunny. Really)

My brother’s for me was “Big Mouth”.

Let me tell you.
Holy fricking A. Both trouble maker and “Big Mouth” are at it again.

Troublemaker successfully trashed two computers this evening.

a) Spark that killed off the power on my Emachine. .. not to mention an FDisk error which means that either *EVERYTHING* is gone or *EVERYTHING* will be really expensive or time suckage to recover.

b) The Gateway does not recognize any hard disks. Neither the master, nor the slave. Nada. And this from attempts to reformat the disks from NTFS to Fat32 so I could reinstall win98 (over win 2K) on this computer so that it could be networked effectively as an file server/storage for the Emachine.

How’d this happen?
Oh, figured the best way to get the gateway’s drives to be reformatted to Fat 32 was to slave it over to the Emachine on XP. Woops. Only format’s in NTFS. Looked for the Fdisk function and thought I could use that to select the drive to make that happen on. Uh… woops.

And then the spark resulted from multiple drive/power/pin cord swap outs. Mother fricker. At least it didn’t touch the mother board. Hopefully it’ll be a relatively painless fix to get the power replaced.

Ya see? Just enough knowledge to be dangerous. To myself.

Frick on a stick. Help please? Any ideas? Pretty pretty please. I’m about ready to bawl my eyes out. Seriously.

All my online photos for the last 3 years are on the emachine. All my articles, emails, contact information, (well plaxo can at least back up the contacts) writing projects, and *gulp* various other programs, archived media files and etc. was on that machine.

When I ran Fdisk I think it just created a partition marker and didn’t actually format (didn’t take but a few seconds to reboot… and then to realize that something was tragically fucked up)

Oy veh.

If I don’t write you back an email in the next few days, I hope you’ll understand and forgive me.


5 Comments

Unless something has changed in the ten years since I last did this, you’re screwed. The only way to recover from an fdisk is to send your drive into a data recovery service, which tends to be on the pricey side.

Hopefully, someone can prove me wrong.

No backups, I assume?

Posted by dansays on 5 January 2004 @ 6am

Hey, I know someone that can help you out. If only I could remember his name… umm… I think it started with an “m”… something like… me? Oh yeah, that’s his name. Me. You lose my phone number or something?

Posted by frick on 5 January 2004 @ 1pm

There is a slight possibility that your E-Machines HD might still be okay. It depends on whether you deleted any paritions on the Master HD when you were fiddling with the HDs. Since you were trying to reformat the slave drive, as long as you only were messing with parition info on that HD, then your e-machines HD data should be okay..

As for the Gateway not recognizing either HD, that could be an issue with master and slave jumpers, or since you deleted the paritions on the gateway HD, it’s not gonna boot either..
Also if the gateway is an older computer, it might not recognize the E-Machine HD if newer or larger size (older pc’s had bios limitations of 32gb).

There is also a slight possibility that with the spark, the circuit boards on the HD’s could have gotten fried.

However let’s say circuit board on Emachines HD got fried, but u hadn’t deleted any of the partition data with fdisk. You could hunt down an exact model replacement HD from ebay, and then swap out the circuit boards.

The other issue is you still have a dead Emachines PC, hopefully sparks didn’t cause too much damage. You could try unplugging all the power connections and then replug them and see if the PC works. Sometimes PCs can catch short circuits and just shut everything down.

Possibly time for a new PC? occasionally there can be some pretty good deals on Dell P4’s..

Good luck with everything.. Wish could’ve given better diagnosis, but only have limited info.

Posted by Deef on 6 January 2004 @ 12am

following up…

If the parition info on the Emachines HD got corrupted or you erased it via fdisk, here are two links:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q153/9/73.asp&NoWebContent=1

microsoft article about recovering corrupted boot sectors

http://www.bitmart.net/r2k.shtml

commercial program that supposedly can restore deleted ntfs partitions..

Posted by Deef on 6 January 2004 @ 12am

http://staff.washington.edu/trav/linux/lost_partition.html

http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

Might be of help if you only trashed the partition table. Assumes some linux knowledge, but should be able to recover partition info.

Dave S.

Posted by Dave S. on 7 January 2004 @ 1am

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Life Lesson #1.2004 Hope? Maybe?