Drive won't boot

[Down the Pub]

had a real horrible day today, and just to make matters worse my primary hd has gone booty up, pc posts and all that untill it tries to start windows. now i haven't tweaked anything athough i have tried to get it to boot from last known good config, not a massive hill of beans as luckily i brought a new hd the other day, so just installed windows on that and when in my computer i can acces the other drive...good.

question it this, i had a couple of messages in thunderbird that aren't there and a few other bits that i can't seem to find on the old drive, is there anyway of retriving them? (have looked on my ntl email page and they are not there, i assume that when t-bird downloads them they are then wiped from the server?)

[MadGamer]

Im pretty sure they are wiped from the server unless you specify in Thunderbird the option "Leave a copy of message on server".

[Paul K]

Should still be on the drive unless something went wrong
http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/100.html
might want to do a search for the relevant *. extension for the files in question and then import them into the client again.

[abailey152]

Originally Posted by Down the Pub

i haven't tweaked anything athough i have tried to get it to boot from last known good config

Doing this may have restored your system to a state prior to downloading the messages. Unfortunately, if this is the case, the messages may be lost.

Not if you use a file recovery program.Ive used one simply called Filerecovery 3.2 that ive had a lot of success from this week. Recovered a large amount of data from a drive that wouldnt allow a pc to post by simply connecting to a ide to usb bridge and connecting to it from windows

[abailey152]

Not if you use a file recovery program.Ive used one simply called Filerecovery 3.2

Agreed.

But results can be variable. Depends on whether the data has been overwritten at all. And at $60 for the full working version, any lost data would need to be important, although I see the free demo will recover very small files, so may be of some use.

$60 dollars I must have missed that bit