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Critical hard drive problems. Did I lose my data?

Feb 11, 2014 1:45PM PST

I'm running windows xp on a home built system I made a few years back with a 1 TB hdd.

I'm very afraid I've lost pretty much my entire life's work. And before you mention backing up, I actually did have a backup in a lockbox in a secondary location. Turns out the secondary location flooded and the lockbox doesn't seem to be water tight. The backup drive is a lump of rust now so I'm screwed if I can't get my drive working.

I hadn't defragged my hard drive in about six months or so, so I figured it was time to do it. So I ran a system scan using the built in windows utility. It found some file corruption errors and the like, but I have hundreds of thousands of files, so I figured it wasn't a huge deal.
I then attempted to run a defrag, but it gave me an error that mentioned something about about the defragmentation engine losing connection or something like that.

So I rebooted into safe mode, and ran the defrag there. I left it overnight and all day long, it was still only 9% and my hard drive was going like mad. I became concerned so I paused, then stopped the defrag, planning on running some drive scans.

I rebooted my system and it gave me a drive error.
"A Disk Read Error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". I freaked out and then attempted to use Hiren's bootcd to view the drive/recover my data. It wouldn't mount but drive was detected and showed it had the proper amount of data used on it (I believe it was 938GB out of 1TB).

I then started surfing the 'net like crazy and then found recommendations to boot up using a windows XP cd (I used a genuine cd I actually bought) and enter recovery console.

I did this, then followed instructions stating I should run chkdsk /r
I did this three times, each time taking several hours. The first time said it had some errors, each time after that mentioned no errors and there are no bad sectors on the drive.

I rebooted, no change.

Then I further followed the instructions and ran:
FixMBR
and
FixBOOT

then i exited and rebooted, it then said NTDLR or something like that was missing.
I went to yet another site that said to copy them from the cd to the drive. I did this.
This is where I freaked out. It's showing nothing on the drive, but chkdsk and other programs are still showing that 938GB or so are being used.

I run hiren's boot cd again and can view and access the drive now, but it shows nothing but the files I copied over.

Is my data gone? Or does the fact that its still showing the data being used a sign that I can possibly recover my precious data?

Help? Please? This drive is now the only copy of over 17 years of work+irreplaceable family photos of family members who have now passed+pretty much my entire adult life.

Discussion is locked

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STOP WRITING TO THAT DRIVE!
Feb 11, 2014 2:26PM PST
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Use a LIVE CD or DVD from Linux
Feb 12, 2014 2:24AM PST

You will find a file manager there which can help you find and copy files from the drive.