Lost Unreal Install

[dustinechoes849]

Well, it seems the HDD that I have my 10-or-so-GB Unreal install on, is gone.
Years of mapping and collecting .UMX files and such down the drain.

This may seem a bit far-fetched, but is there any way some fragment of the Unreal install is left on my PC, like in a temp folder? Doubt it, but I'd do almost anything to get something from my Unreal install back.


Thanks

[Smirftsch]

nope, all within Unreal folder, nothing somewhere else. Perhaps trying to recover the hdd is more worth to spend some time on. What happened?

[Hyper]

[olist][*]Just restore your backup assuming you made one. 
[*]Check if the drive containing the lost files still spins up. If yes
[*]If it failed or -God forbid- you never made a backup: Try to scan the broken harddisk with a recovery program like File Scavenger or Recuva. DO NOT WRITE TO THE DISK. Restore to somewhere else.
[*]If FileScavenger failed to find anything because of bad sectors: Try the program SpinRite 6. This is an older program and requires a computer that supports SATA in PATA mode. (Legacy mode) It does NOT support drives larger than 2 TB, NO AHCI and NO 4k sector advanced format drives.
[*]If your files have been served at public Unreal servers, you may be able to recover some from GigaCache.
[*]If it still fails: Consider if you want to pay an (expensive) data recovery service.
 
 
[*]If this is above your budget and everything fails: Cry. Cry out loud and long. Ask someone to comfort and hug you. Sleep a night over it. Keep the damaged hard drive AND DO NOT WRITE TO IT in case you get luminous recovery ideas in the future.
[*]Start all over and make regular backups. Or do it automatically via Carbonite or similar services.
[/olist]

[xan1242]

dd-rescue might help if all else fails, but be careful as excessive use may damage the hard drive even further, the process must be as quick and as painless as possible if you're planning to do data recovery on your own.

If you do manage to get a disk image with dd-rescue, then you're pretty safe after that.

[dustinechoes849]

Unfortunately, I physically lost the HDD itself. Had a quite large scale project in the works, too. REST IN PIECE



(that 750GB was expensive, too :p)
back to square 1

[Shinnokxz]

Data recovery can be worth a shot if not anything since there's not much to lose.

Use some type of bitlocking interface (no writing, only read) to make an image of the drive to work on (DD image, whatever) so you're not working on the drive itself granted it spins up. Use a program that can process the image for strings (header and footer information of a file, a UMX file for example)

[Dr.Flay™]

Unfortunately, I physically lost the HDD itself. Had a quite large scale project in the works, too. REST IN PIECE



(that 750GB was expensive, too :p)
back to square 1

If you have physically lost your drive, then any temp folders would be on it, unless as I suspect but you have not made clear, you have lost an external drive ?

Perhaps mentioning that will stop people posting endless recovery solutions

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

Invent a time machine and send yourself a message to not lose that hard drive.

[Hyper]

How do you physically lose an harddrive? They do by themselves have the tendency to stay where they are.

[dustinechoes849]

How do you physically lose an harddrive? They do by themselves have the tendency to stay where they are.

[edit]made this video out of boredom[/edit]

[dustinechoes849]

Managed to dig the HDD out of the basement. Found it when looking for an adapter to use with a laptop I aquired.

What was it doing down there? Who knows...

I DONT CARE

I GOT ME UNREAL BACK

WEW
OH YEEEEE


YEAH!!!

[Hyper]

Just a suggestion: You may want to make a backup of it and keep it somewhere safe.