All is Lost

Well, I've lost everything. All of my toys. All of my research. My programming environment. The thousands of hours I've spend developing my audio mixing and mastering skills.

The story goes like this; I got this new (to me, not to the world) Sony DVD-writer which I think may be capable of reading the high density areas of Saturn discs and GDROMs. I've been holding on to it for a while, so today I decided I was going to finally install it. That's when I remembered that I needed to adjust the cables on my floppy drive (believe it or not. I need it for my T1000 anyways.) So I started to adjust it, when I heard a snap. Which was when I noticed that the SATA cable the HDD wasn't attached.

That tiny little nub of plastic that held the pins together broke off, along with the bottom of the socket.

But there's good news! None of the pins were broken, you see, so if I just put the cable by them, the contact should stay. It did work!

So I tore out the HDD from Werkzeug's nearly-identical twin, Stallion, and attached it to the second SATA plug. I didn't feel like waiting for a disc image to download and burn so I could partition the new drive. So I just put in the Vista disc. I figured that, since it was also a recovery disc, I could just use the partition editor on that.

Well, as it turns out, Vista's DiscPart is pretty much crap. It didn't know the difference between my two drives, so I ended up deleting the partitions on the old hard drive. I lost everything. I had an album ready to be released as soon as the album art was done, and was almost done with another album. Oh, and I don't have any of the years of work I put into building my system.

Well, the good news is that the data can theoretically be brought back to perhaps a full partition and filesystem restoration at little to no cost, depending on if you believe that time is money or not. Luckally, the new HDD had a (very old) version of Ubuntu. And GNU has this program called TestDisk (or something to that extent) which is supposed to be able to salvage data from a number of file systems, thankfully including NTFS.

So... I'll call you back if I have any good luck?
If not, I'll just steal your money and send the disk to a data recovery specialist.

BTW, DiskPart=another reason to hate Microsoft.