I'm getting so confused

[AequitasKD]

I've had my computer for maybe 2 ish years. During the course of that time I built up tons of music and movies and games and such. I reformatted maybe once or twice in there, but I backed the stuff I really wanted, but since my last format I have probably double the amount of data I wanted to keep and didn't back it up. I was planning to reformat sometime soon, and spend the time backing up all my stuff, but then misfortune struck, and while I was over gaming at a friends with my computer, it somehow stopped working all the sudden because of a physical memory error when I ever I tried to boot up. I researched the error on another computer and found that I could fix the problem by resetting the registry with a lot of work through DOS CMD. I followed the whole guide to the last step where I got lost/confused, but my computer was pretty much working by then, so I just tried to shortcut it myself, this seemed to cause some minor hassles, so I reread the guide and figured out the last step. This pretty much set everything to how it was before the problem, besides what I had tried to shortcut. Just for safe measure I decided to run a CHKDSK with my windows cd to see that I had'nt messed anything up in my shortcutting efforts. I put in the windows disc and booted it, but i had to wait for all the temp drivers to load and such before I could get to any options. So I went and showed my friend something on his computer. Then our other friend comes over who has heard that I have had a problem with my computer, but he knows nothing about computers. By this time the option screen is up and he thinks he will be helpful and press the repair option. I walk back over to my computer to see that he has in fact pressed the reformat button...wow. So basically the rest of the weekend, that I was supposed to be gaming, I spent trying to get my comp back to a state of usability. I reformatted again because I thought he may have messed something up when he did it. I decided to try something I heard about and set a partition for windows by itself. I forgot format the remaining amount of the hard drive. I finally get on to my desktop and start installing stuff to find the my only hard drive space is the 10 gigs I allowed for Windows. I left my Windows disk at my friends, so I couldn't try to format the rest with the standard procedure. I eventually got around this by using PartitionMagic 8 to format the rest of the HDD. So I now have a 10 gig partition which is c: and k: a 176 gig partition that i made with PM8. My HDD is advertised at 200GB, but actually has 186, I understand this. After doing some searching about file recovery, I tried a few programs, including Recover My Files. I did searches on all of them, most of them took like 5 minutes and only came up with all my current data and maybe some things I had deleted from the Recycle Bin. This is the same result I get with the fast format recover on Recover My Files. Then I tried to do a complete format recover, with my specific files to search for, namely .mp3, .avi and some others. It took forever and I went to bed. Woke up in the morning to find someone had turned off my computer, I estimate it probably had run for 16 hours. Restarted the search, about 8 hours in it froze. Started another one, and went to bed again. I woke up to find it had frozen again and I couldnt maximize it, since I had minimized it that night, so I don't know how far it got. Each time that I have seen the results before it freezes, which you can see in the background. It says it has found about 4000 .mp3 files at 5 hours and a lot of other of my selected files types. After doing a search with windows search I find that I have a lot less than 4000 .mp3 files on my computer so this makes me optimistic, but it keeps freezing, so I never get to finish a full scan. Now, I'm trying to do a scan with just the default file types to search for, which seems to be going way faster, but in looking at the files its uncovering, I only see stuff that I know I've only had on here since this new format. So now I don't what to think. Sorry this post was so long, but I didn't really know what information was pertinent. Also, I'm kinda bored with none of my music and movies, and I keep having to run these scans, so I don't want to play a game in case it messes something up. Thanks in advance.

[GDH]

If something goes wrong with your disk like this the best thing you can do is leave it alone and try data recovery. By formatting and using partition magic etc it just makes things worse in terms of getting your data back.

You have two options.

1. You can try a "Complete Format Recover" with the DEFAULT FILES ONLY selected. At the end of the search it will rebuild in the results window whatever of the old drive that it can find. You need to wait until the end of the search. I would say that your old partition records are probably toast now, so this may not be the best search to run.

2. A Complete File Search for specific file types. MP3 and video files are the most resource intensive files to find so run a separate search for these. This search will find your files by looking for the header and the footer. It may not give you the original file names back.

In both searches you will be able to preview the contents of the files in the results screen.

I am not sure what you have done to your old data in terms of where the new partitions are on the disk. I think the best thing to do would be to search the "physical drive" - that way you are scanning over all areas of the disk looking for deleted files.

I hope this helps. Good luck.