Crashed hard drive on a Bruker AXS S4 Pioneer X-ray spectrometer. Help!

[Jwalling]

Hello all,

I'm trying to recover a hard drive in a XP machine for a friend of mine that controls a Bruker axs s4 pioneer X-ray fluorescence spectrometer.
http://www.oulu.fi/cmnt/node/15694

The drive is in a Dell Optiplex computer. So far, I've been able to recover the entire O/S to another drive and get it booting again, but it's missing a lot of files and folders in the SPECplus program files directory - here's all that is left. It looks like all the files beginning with A to S are missing. There's also references in shortcuts that point to subfolders in this directory as well. Hopefully someone out there has one of these and can send me the files. I know it's a long shot...

Thanks!

Jay

[justanothercanuck]

doing some googling, the application seems to be called spectra plus.  https://www.bruker.com/products/x-ray-diffraction-and-elemental-analysis/x-ray-fluorescence/xrf-software/applications.html

where do you get it though might be a problem.  i couldn't find it with a quick search.  since the company is still around, might not hurt to ask them, they might just give you a copy since the device looks to be a legacy model at this point. 

[Jwalling]

doing some googling, the application seems to be called spectra plus.  https://www.bruker.com/products/x-ray-diffraction-and-elemental-analysis/x-ray-fluorescence/xrf-software/applications.html

where do you get it though might be a problem.  i couldn't find it with a quick search.  since the company is still around, might not hurt to ask them, they might just give you a copy since the device looks to be a legacy model at this point. 

Thanks. Well, I tried putting the drive on a USB to PATA and running a chkdsk. The chkdsk would not complete saying that it was out of disk space even though there was 30 gigs free on a 40 gig drive.I then tried using Steve Gibson's spinrite. It ran over 20 hours recovering some data, and when it was done, I again ran a chkdsk which completed this time. It looks like I got all the data back! Woohoo! 

Jay

[TerraHertz]

It would still be a good idea to see if you can get a known-good fileset from the manufacturer. Just because the HD check says the files are all back, does not guarantee they are all error free. Until you can do a file verify against a known good set, it wouldn't be wise to rely on that drive's software to produce valid science data.

Funny how people run high cost, essential  old equipment like that, and don't bother to make a drive backup image.

[station240]

When you do get it working 100%, make a 1:1 copy onto a second hard drive. Leave that drive in the machine but unplugged, that way no one can toss out the backup during a spring clean. It's also excellent disaster recovery, just swap the cables.

[amyk]

It shouldn't need to be said that you definitely should replace the drive with a new one. Don't just "recover" and then keep using the old drive, because it will certainly fail completely.

[Jwalling]

It shouldn't need to be said that you definitely should replace the drive with a new one. Don't just "recover" and then keep using the old drive, because it will certainly fail completely.

Of course! I'm keeping the old drive for now till the machine is up and running. Also made a ghost image backup of the new drive for safe keeping. The guy that owns the machine wanted to "take the path of least resistance" to recover the system rather than contact the manufacturer. He's a surplus dealer - apparently the machine belonged to Shell Oil at one time. When you click on my computer, properties their name is there.

Thanks all.
Jay