Hard drive crash---lost everything

[frogline]

My pc crashed and I lost everything----I have a new one now and I can access my control panel but I never backed up my site. Do I have to build my site all over again from scratch?-----frogline

[mrmagoo144]

no - go to your control panel and move all the images (not pages) from the server to your hard drive. keep them in the same position they are now. second, open new page at the top by getting existing html. copy the exact url address for the page then click ok. it will take a minute or so but you will get your page in tact and hopefully the images will all be there. you may have to tweak it a bit. save the page and publish it. i would start with the index page. contact me if you need some one on one help with this. once you get the first page the rest are easy. my contact information is on my website.
mrmagoo144
www.videopostcards.info

[Tom vR]

Watch this tutorial to recover pages from existing html pages on your website. You will still need a bit of tweaking to do, but at least you will have most.
Click here for tutorial by VH.

[AJ113]

Was it your hard drive or your pc that crashed? Have you tried connecting your old hard drive as a slave to your new pc? If the hard drive still works you will be able to drag the files off your old drive on to your new one. Or you could leave your old hard drive connected permanently to use as storage.

[Vasili]

Originally Posted by AJ113

Was it your hard drive or your pc that crashed? Have you tried connecting your old hard drive as a slave to your new pc? If the hard drive still works you will be able to drag the files off your old drive on to your new one. Or you could leave your old hard drive connected permanently to use as storage.

*Ahem*

A PC crash usually means the OS is corrupted, and that means the hard drive is also (since the OS formats the HD). Reinstalling the OS wipes the drive (if it is physically functional), and re-booting to another motherboard conflicts with primary drive, as HD's are not formatted to operate without a primary RAM.
Professional data recovery is not cheap, and requires the specialized hardware and software to investigate whether such a task is even feasible.

[AJ113]

*Ahem*
A PC crash could be for a variety of reasons, including the OS going belly up, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it is usually the reason. It is usually due to hardware failure of some kind, often as a result of overheating.

Even if this is the case, it is quite likely that the data can be recovered by installing the hard drive as a secondary drive to a working PC and copying the saved data over to another drive. An OS failure doesn't necessarily mean that the data files cannot be recovered. In my experience quite the reverse is true. The only time this procedure has no chance of working is when the hard drive has suffered mechanical failure.

Even if the OS has crashed and you do not have the facility to install it on a working computer there are plenty of avenues to try first before resorting to a reformat.

Interestingly, both my hard drives crashed this week. After investigation, a faulty ribbon cable was found to be the source of the fault.