With my usual unfortunate timing I had just started doing some backups, of a full setup almost, when there was a brief power outage, only a a matter of seconds but enough to make the PC reboot and interfere with the backup.

I continued with the backup and blow me! Power Outage again, but this time on reboot, my PC wouldn't even open the disk - it showed the drive letter but said it was 'corrupt - do I want to format' (of course no)

I looked at Disk Admin, tried CHKDSK, Partition Magic, Recuva and various other utilities getting a selection of errors like Master File Table Corrupt, Unrecoverable Partitions, Damaged Partitions, Damaged File Structure, Missing Partition etc etc I tried booting into Linux and tried various fixes there, nothing

Searched more on the internet and came across TestDisk, a little freeware DOS utility, and.....it has fixed everything, recovered the files and even rebuilt the folder structure!

Being DOS it's all command line, but there is a very good WIKI showing step by step procedures...the smile on my face now lights up the building, I had almost got to the pioint where I had accepted that yes, I had lost some 150 gig of important files!

I have nothing to do with this programme but can thoroughly recommend it

Time to invest in a UPS I think!

hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

TestDisk - bloomin' marvellous thing.

I managed to delete a 500gb partition in error when doing a reinstall - doh! Thus wiping all the data, TestDisk not only reinstated the partition painlessly, it did so with (nearly) all my data restored.
There were a few files that had glitches but thanks to that it saved me a whole heap of grief.

& yes I did have backups of... 'cough' nearly all.

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"The tech gets better, the user error remains the same.." Roberts Plant