As I mentioned in my previous post, my work computer’s hard drive went down for the count last Thursday. All signs were pointing to a catastrophic hardware failure, yet the drive continued to show faint hints of life. Ontrack’s software was able to pull the names of many of the files off of the drive before consistently freezing at 76% complete. Windows’ bootloader was able to launch from the hard drive and proceede until the time for mounting the boot volume (hence the error). I didn’t give up hope.

That’s not to say the IT department rep shared my faith. That guy made a cursory attempt to mount the drive using BartPE, which even a untrained monkey could have told you would not have worked in that situation. After that feeble gesture, he fed me a bunch of bull related to data loss and data recovery software before leaving. I HATE it when IT guys lie to my face. They think they’re being clever, but I’m not fooled for even a second.

Now, the guy doing the actual replacement of my hard drive was much easier to deal with. He was receptive to the idea of loaning me the old drive for a couple of days to continue my recovery efforts (it would have to be returned eventually to fulfill the warranty terms). We agreed that he would put a new drive in my computer, image the new drive, and hook my old drive up as a slave device. After performing that operation, he gave the contraption back to me.

A wonderous thing occured. When my computer booted off its new drive, Windows launched and — this is key — mounted my old drive. All my files were intact and accessible! There was no sign of the previous turmoil.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, and I’m even less certain what fixed it, but I do know that I got my data back.

Needless to say, I spared no time copying my precious data from the old drive onto the new drive and onto the network drive.