Need Assistance From the Techies

[armageddon272]

K, so I turn on my comp this morning thinking "I'll listen to some music and maybe play a game or two before I go to that party" and lo and behold, winamp can't find the music in my library. So I go to My Documents and find that that file doesn't exist. So I go to my Computer and discover that my 160gb hardrive that I keep all my personal files on is - somehow - no longer formatted. Now, this has happenned once before and I know if I just reformat it now I will lose about 60gb of movies, tv shows, school documents, and most importantly, music. Is there any way I can recover my data, and does anyone know how this can happen? Twice?

[Kakero]

If you have winXP. Did you try System Restore? That might recover the lost files.

[Ilander]

Ditto on the restore, but also, try moving the hard drive to another IDE/SATA port (whichever it is, and assuming you have one free besides what you're using).

Sometimes, there's just a spontaneous loss of being able to access a hard drive, so getting the auto-detection mechanisms up and running might help...at least, it's helped me before.

Barring that, try another computer. If none of those work...well, unless you want to pay the hard drive wizards (and they're not easy to find, either), you'll probably be out of luck, unfortunately.