I've lost my Unity Project!

My hdd has unfixable bad sectors and I didn’t back up my files first!
I want to save my Unity project to an external hdd and discard the old hdd but I’m getting hal.dll errors when I boot.

In the recovery console, I’m getting ‘access denied’ when typing this,

expand e:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll

If I just type this,

expand e:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\

It asks me if I want to overwrite hal.dll and I type Y and hit enter.

It says 1 file(s) expanded

I type exit to reboot and still get the hal.dll missing problem.

I’m guessing that its not copying to c:\windows\system32\hal.dll. What am I doing wrong here? :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Sounds like the hal.dll in your system32 is corrupt but still in use. Can you pull the drive and mount it on another machine with a workinf OS to copy the dll back in place?

no, you won’t fix that so easy mate. Easiest method is to use your Windows CD and do a repair. You will however lose all your updates and registry, means reinstalling drivers and programs

Don’t worry about your project, its fine, this error does not affect other content, i had it before.
If you are still worried, do what JDonavan said - hook up your HDD to another working computer as a secondary drive and back up data.

edit: actually you could try ERD commander from Microsoft, if you had system restore running. Its liveCD running on WindowsPE, it can log into your windows using its own boot and rest of loaders, then lets you restore system, work with registry and even delete hotfixes… cool stuff. Dont guarranty it will work, but u can try. Demo version works like full only 30 days, should be enough

Also just to be 100% sure, check out if you are booting the correct drive trough BIOS (Boot order), mostly PCs got POST feature to choose temporary boot drive (mostly F12). Just check that you don’t have any external HDDs plugged in when you do that

Also for future reference, i would recommend you to use dropbox.com
Its like a folder on your computer that synchronizes files with their server as well as all of your other computers running the program logged in.
Once changes appear in that folder, new files are being uploaded instantly and downloaded to other computers.
This way i work on 1 project with 2 computers simultaneously. Save work in one computer, in few seconds assets are updating on the other (it works trough LAN too, thats where speed comes in)

And if both computers suddenly die, files are still backed up on dropbox server

also theres public folder u can use for webplayer tests, put images in in and what not, feels like imageshack is gonna become useless
its free 2GB btw