Lost Data

[JTS]

I have been using Cumulus for most of this year after setting up a Maplin station that I received for Christmas and have enjoyed trying to learn a little about websites and coding etc, There is a vast amount of knowledge shared on the forum and it is an interesting lunchtime read getting quite technical information presented in a way that non techies can understand. The reason for my first post is quite simple although I suspect the solution may not be possible but worth asking. After updating the the Samsung netbook used to store data and upload info to the website over the weekend, I woke on Sunday morning to a screen message that the said "no operating system found". I have had the IT boys at work look at it and they seem to think the hard disk is dead as it will not allow a reinstall of windows 7 as there is no available disk space. I have managed to get the station and website up and running again using another netbook although all of the Cumulus data for the last 10 months is lost on the failed disk. I also upload the data to Wunderground/PWS and Met Office WOW and had a thought that it may be possible to try and use this data to try and recreate the missing information by adapting this information to load into another install of Cumulus. Anyone have any thoughts of whether this is possible and how to go about doing it?

Thanks in advance for any help.


Neil

[water01]

Don't think much of your IT boys at work if all they did was to try and reinstall W7.

Anybody had a look at with any of the UNIX partition or disk tools booted from a CD ? You may find it is just a boot sector gone AWOL! AT worst you may be able to recover data by taking the disk out and putting it in a caddy and looking at it with another computer via USB etc. That would be my way of recovering from this type of failure.

While we are at it, as most of us amateur(?) weather watchers rely on years of data, how many of us are not backing up vital data. Everyone should have a backup strategy in place as disk failures can strike at any time, and usually when you least want them!!

All my desktop computers are doing partition based backups every day so I can recover from failure and laptops have valuable data backed up on a weekly basis (they don't get used as much as the desktops), so the most I can loose is 7 days data. External 1TB disks are so cheap nowadays there is no excuse.

[JTS]

OK. Not quite answering the question that I asked but thanks for your input. The disk is dead unfortunately.


Thanks


Neil

[steve]

I'm not aware of any way of doing it, but someone may have written something to do it.

[JTS]

Thanks, didn't think it would be easy, read a lot of posts and not come across much.