[Chumba]

STOP!

1) dont touch the drive in terms of trying to access it. remove it. Your MBR and disk main table are corrupted.

2) If you can, get a KNoppix recovery disk - thats Linux disk that can boot your machine. Download the ISO and burn it.

3) Get another hard drive - smallest, cheapest, old, whatever - shouyldnt cost you more than $20 at a used shop.

4) Install that as the primary drive, use the Knoppix disk to format it to FAT32 format on one single large partition that takes the whole disk.

5) Put the "broken" drive back in (after a trip to the freezer), but hook it as a SLAVE (check the jumpers and put it on the correct part of the cable).

6) Boot from the Knoppix Recovery disk - it should help you get to your data. Copy the important stuff to the "new" drive.

7) once thats done, with KNoppix you shoudl beable to acces the internet - upload the data (source code) for safekeeping - maybe to here, or to a "free" place - there are places that let you use a gig to 5 gigs for online storage.

8) Reformat/whatever, get your OS reinstalled on a NEW hard drive.

And, most importantly...

9) Unless you have good reasons to the contrary, Start an Open Source project on Sourceforge, learn to use CVS remotely, upload your code, and back your stuff up to CVS on a regular basis.

Don't worry about open source - You dont need to let anyone else add things to it - you can make yourself the only submitter for changes. All this means is that if somone else wants to take your code and build it themsleves they can. You dont have to take patches or anything from anyone other than yourself.


I've helped people thru this before. This is what you need to do if there is anything recoverable.

If you have a gmail account, email me - I can send you all the software you need to do this with, as a cd image ready to burn (bootable, with a menu system). its about 300MB or so (been a while, so it may be smaller now).