Topic awaiting preservation: Trying to recover data from a dying/dead HD

Heya all... Got a situation here. Was going through and cleaning out my computer a while ago and during defrag it idled out. Somehow it got all jacked up and I can't boot into the HD anymore. At this point I've already got a new HD and gotten everything installed on it. Thing is... I'd like to get my data off of the old drive and while windows will recognize it it says it isn't formatted. Anyone know any tricks to get into a drive without completely reformatting it or is there a way to read some of the data after it is reformatted?

Win Xp, Maxtor 160 Gb SATA (but maxtor tools suck)

GD

Try a data recovery service. I had to use one of these two years ago, it cost a bit of cash but was worth it. I now keep lots of back-ups.

If the service is way out of your budget and the drive is otherwise functioning - try a Google for "harddrive partition recovery" or variations on that theme. You will find plenty of tools designed to rebuild the main boot records of apparently deleted/formatted drives. So long as you have not re-formatted the drive, it may be possible to recover the partitions if the data still exists (which is likely).

Most tools you will find are usually free and just as effective as the commmercial alternatives.

Of course, nothing really matches a data recovery service.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzz.....

The first thing you can do is to boot from a linux live cd, example knoppix which will mount everything it recognizes as a disk.
With a bit of luck you can find your files and copy them to a working drive, you need to have your working drive as master and the faulty one as slave before you start though.
More info here: http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

I still havn't been able to recover 80 Gb of data after a disc consistency check whent totally sour on me... my drive just spins up and the reading arm goes back and forth, back and forth...
Nothing even recognizes it as a disk, formatted or not.


I can't afford a real datarecovery on my disc since I really suspect a physical error which would require disassembly in a clean room = $$$$....

I'll keep my fingers crossed for ya, and please holler if you make it work along with an xplanation on what you did (in case I've missed a trick or 2).
/Dan

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(Edited by DmS on 08-29-2005 20:56)

We use Data Recovery Group and they've always been real good. In fact, we recommend them all the time at work.

Well... It seems I'm getting close. After days of trials and a lot of BS... I'm finally at a point where I'm confident in getting a 100% data return. I don't know your situation DmS but my drive was able to be recognized by the BIOS and therefore WinXP. I used the free Testdisk to detect and write a working partition table to the drive and also repair the MBR. The MFT search took 1.5 days and didn't seem to work.

After many searches and attempts to use trials and freeware amongst other things (most attempts taking 1.5 days) I found Stellar Phoenix. What an amazing program. It's initial low level scan took 15-20 minutes and its deep scan for lost/deleted files took roughly an hour. Stellar also has a partition and logical drive recognition module but I had already gotten to that point so I am unsure of its usefulness. From what I've seen in the rest of the program it should work well. It does cost $130 US but, to be honest, I find it worth it. It found all of my photos that the others weren't even near to recovering. Much less my music library, D&D world information and my novel. I'm a very happy man right now. One thing that irked me is that I wasn't able to save my scan information in Stellar before reinstalling the full version to register. This meant I had to spend the hour+ scanning all over again. Irritating more than anything.

From what I'm able to tell if the system recognizes the HD it doesn't matter what OS you're in to fix it. If it doesn't even register at that level... well... I'll have to search more. Both Tesdisk and Stellar have Linux versions amongst others if that is your preference. Hope this helps.

GD

Well... Finally after more time than I expected... It has finished recovering my files. Of the data I recovered roughly 30% was at least partially corrupt. I have yet to nail down a pattern of corruption be it date stamps or sector location but... I'll figure it out eventually. One thing I was wondering about... Does anyone know of a tool that can recover jpg's from the stored thumbnail information? Some of my pictures will show a thmbnail but not load an image on open or preview with the windows tools. I haven't gotten PS loaded yet to see if it'll be able to recomposite the images better than the core windows garbage. If anyone knows of something off the top of their head I'd appreciate it. I haven't searched via google yet but that's my next stop.

GD

I don't know much about this program, but it just happens that TUDOGS sent me an e-mail about it this morning. It claims to be able to recover all kinds of images from damaged media. You might give it a try.

Let us know how it works if you try it.

.



-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.


(Edited by hyperbole on 09-09-2005 18:13)