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Community Newsletter: Q&A: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive?
- 10/10/08 3:51 PM
Undo last system restore operation performed
by aijlf - 10/22/08 5:07 AM In reply to: lost data by edjsmesd2Hello,
I believe that there would be an option for you to 'undo the last system restore' operation performed. Also, try restoring your system to the date on which you know your system was functioning well. The system restore wizard would give you a calendar option window from where you can navigate forward or backward.
Also, pray!
Oldy, but it has worked for me
by halff - 10/3/08 9:52 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I have had the same problem
What I did was remove the drive,put a new one in its place and put the old one in a ziplock bag. Take as much air out as possible, and freeze it overnight. This takes up the wear by shrinking the clearances in the main bearing.
Just put it back in the morning, plugged into the cables ,not installed in the box, and transfer the data as required to the new drive, If it works it may take a couple of trips to the freezer to recover all you want as it heats up and fails again.
Worth a try, and its free
I'm confident this will Work...
by benbois - 10/3/08 10:04 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
This Will Work- Someday <:(
With my first, and second and third HD Crash, I tried all of the usual, the free- even took it to both the Fire Dogs and the Geek Squad- where they wanted a lot of money per gig recovered, with no quaranty that anything would be usable or Recovered! Not to mention the base fee (Pre-Recovery, set fee) of nearly $100 (Then the Per GB fee kicj=ks in).
I simply bought a new, larger HD- I'm now up to a 500GB internal- and gently placed the old HD in the New One's box.
You see, my idea is that someday- sooner maybe- there will be a program for complete recovery from a "bustit" HD. And you can bet I did not have EVERYthing backed up- including the last GB or so of my recentist photos. So relief better be here sooner.
Be sure to keep your old HD's in the box, in a cool dry place. And wait for the Cure!
Honestly, I was stunned when hearing the costs involved- with Nary a Promise of 1mb recovered!
disc data recovery
by nmharleyrider - 10/3/08 10:05 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I used the Gillware Company to recover my hard drive. They were very reasonable compared to most companies which wanted fees up in the thousands of dollars. The cost depends on the problem with the drive. In my case they fixed an electric component on the drive and were able to fire it up from there. If they have to open it up and take it into their clean room, the price goes up. They recovered my entire disc since it was an electrical componenet and there had been no head crash or other physical damage done to the discs. It did cost me around $300 thought and that may be prohibitive for the college student mentioned.
Corruption recovery
by PC Friendly - 10/3/08 10:12 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Chuck,
I'm an old school tech and the way I've found that is most succesful would be to wrap the drive in plastic wrap, stick in a ziplock freezer bag and put it in your freezer for about six hours. Pull it out (removing the plastic wrap, etc.) and hook it up externally to another system (or as a slave on a desktop). You will have a good chance of recovering the data if it is a physical crash. If it is due to data corruption, there are numerous utilities that can attempt to recover wiped drives or partial recovery of data from corrupt sectors.
PC Friendly, Inc.
SpinRite is your answer
by Milestone - 10/3/08 10:24 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Go to www.grc.com, and buy SpinRite 6.0. As long as there is no major damage to the drive SpinRite will probably fix it!
Spinrite, no question
by letmegopleez - 10/4/08 11:37 AM In reply to: SpinRite is your answer by MilestoneWhenever you think your hard drive is whacked, here is what you do:
1. *Immediately* stop using it -- minimize (preferably eliminate) additional writes.
2. Use Spinrite, as others said. It's worth every penny.
Any fooling around on your part potentially decreases the amount of data that Spinrite will recover. It's absolutely critical that you avoid additional writes (aka additional corruption).
SpinRite
by JohnKZ - 10/3/08 10:25 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
It's not particularly cheap but it's effective - SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm). The current version costs $89 US. I had a problem identical to your daughter's and it salvaged the hard drive and all info. I am still using the old drive as a "slaved spare." No, I don't trust it one hundred percent but it does well as redundant storage bin and page file drive.
One option - ask a tech to buy a similar HDD and swap parts
by geoffwaddell - 10/3/08 10:43 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had the same problem after an electrical storm knocked out my computer.
It was an oldish HDD, and a tech guy bought a second hand HDD that was the same (on Ebay) and swapped some parts over. That got everything back.
The point was that the disc was not damaged - it was the electronics, which were replaceable. He did the work for nix. Cost me AU$60 all up.
You might check to see (or feel) if the disc spins when you boot the computer - I'm betting it doesn't. If it does, you may have less success with this solution. I had had some quotes on file recovery that were frightening, to say the least.
I can't say why but this worked for me
by jpool--2008 - 10/3/08 10:59 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I also had a 120GB hard drive that just became absolutely unreadable. It was a drive from an older PC that I was using as a slave in my next one after that. One day when I tried to access it, the PC told me the drive was not formatted, and asked if I would I like to do so. Of course I said no. I tried accessing it as a slave in another computer with the same results. I had one other computer to try it on, my newest, but it was SATA and the 120GB drive was IDE. I bought a $20 USB SATA/IDE combo adapter and temporarily attached it externally through a USB port. Presto! it showed up as a drive that I could read! I got my important info off of it and then ran a scandisk repair on it as well, and the data was still intact! I won't be saving anything important to it, just in case, but that worked for me.
P.S. - Just in case no one else says it - I have also heard you can literally freeze a bad hard drive (protecting it in a ziploc or similar bag), and it will become readable until it warms up too much, but it can give you time to get your data. That is all about the mechanics and the read/write heads drifting, or "getting out of tune", if you will. Freezing the drive temporarily brings the heads back closer to the hard disk, I believe.
- Jim
Where is my stuff! Hard Drive Recovery.
by JeffBRD - 10/3/08 11:03 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Chuck,
Try Bootmaster. This program was able to restore the MBR (Master Boot Record)on my external drive. The drive was visible in disk management as healthy but it did not have a drive letter. Bootmaster took about 5 minutes to fix the MBR. The drive was assigned a drive letter and I had access to all the data on the drive.
The evaluation is free so you can see if it will work for you before you buy it ($30)
www.filerecovery.biz/
Do not despair (and do not reformat the drive)
hard drive reported as faulty when installed as slave.
by braveonex - 10/3/08 11:08 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had a similar problem some time ago, I suggest the problem is that the slave drive has not been correctly recognised by the PC. and the drive is probably not faulty.
My suggestion is to buy an USB external hard drive adaptor and connect in this way. The adaptor will always be useful for expanding to another external hard drive and recently I have seen that they cost only €17 or thereabouts, which is far cheaper than having your old drive analized.
Also, assuming that your old drive was working OK, you can put the old drive back in, and using the external drive USB interface, copy the old drive over to the new drive (data that is).
Hope this solves your problem.
A mix of good news and bad news... In no particular order...
by flared0ne - 10/3/08 11:13 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The odds are HUGE that a sudden failure of this type, PARTICULARLY with no significant "noise" involved, will turn out to have been caused by some physical device (maybe an active integrated circuit, but just as likely to be a passive resistor, capacitor, diode, etc) which reached its "Mean Time Before Failure" point anomalously early.
In other words, depending on the manufacturer's having chosen to use any of several methods of testing their product as it comes out of the assembly area, there is a good chance that a repair technician could get hooked up to your hard drive and locate a defective component fairly quickly -- replace that device, and you are back 'on the road again'.
In the absence of a qualified technician, someone who knows what they are doing could possibly open up the packaging (intrinsically voiding any remaining warranty, if that's still an issue at this point) and VISUALLY inspect it, looking for any signs of scratches (possibly cutting/weakening circuit traces), localized heat (little exploded surface mount components), etc. Anything beyond 'visual', such as using a meter or oscilloscope probe, takes "knowing what you're doing" up a notch, since you are now risking doing additional damage.
Keep in mind that many electronic assemblies which have cable connections to the outside world often introduce protective devices into the circuits directly adjacent to those connectors -- devices intended to "give their all" in the event of an electrical surge, for example. So I would focus initially in the vicinity of any connectors.
Also, know that one of the most common "early failure" device types is the electrolytic capacitor, a relatively (comparatively) larger component that will be found near the power supply connector and near any secondary regulator circuits.
The bad news is that the odds of being able to find someone with any significant chance of repairing your hard drive are pretty slim (but non-zero, don't give up hope). The biggest issue (not counting that of finding replacements for any defective component that IS found) is generally going to be tracking down a meaningful schematic diagram, to clarify just which of those surface mount devices are capacitors, fuses, diodes, etc. The next best alternative, finding an equivalent WORKING duplicate of the hard drive and taking a chance on damaging IT while using it as a "good" version for comparison, well, that's a decision to be made.
Sounds like it gets down to a question of what is the lost data worth, and how long before its 'shelf life' expires anyway.
Good luck.
Eek, I don't have real good news...
by schlice - 10/3/08 11:29 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
There are two different ways to "corrupt" a hard drive - physically, and logically. Physical corruption involves hardware failure, like clicking noises, contaminated media surfaces, or head crashes. Logical corruption is when the drive is still physically operational, but the data is in a degraded state. For example, if you have a deleted partition, or deleted files, file system corruption, or virus attacks. How it's fixed is dependent on which type of crash you have.
If you have logical corruption, you can usually use software to recover the data. Most reputable disk recovery outlets will offer a free trial of their software, and if you see it working, you can then buy the full version. Look for deals like that before buying.
If you have a physical crash on your hands (which it sounds like you do -- any change in the noise a drive makes indicates a physical problem), stop using the drive right away. Continued attempts to make the drive work could potentially increase the damage to the platters and possibly increase the amount of unrecoverable data. Unfortunately, unless you know how to disassemble a hard drive and replace failing components within it (note: most people, including most average PC techs, do not have the tools or the requisite skill to do this), you're not likely going to be able to salvage the data off of that disk without sending it to a data recovery shop.
This probably isn't the best time to be talking to you about backup, but for when you get your data back (and for everyone else reading this whose hard drives are still operational), please consider backups. External disk storage is cheap enough now that you can get a lot of space for not a lot of money. External hard drives make a great solution for backup. Also, if you don't want to back up disk with disk, or if you'd rather do something "off-site," consider one of the online backup shops specializing in home and/or small business customers. The proliferation of broadband Internet access makes solutions like this feasible. Personally, I use Mozy (www.mozy.com) because their prices are reasonable. $4.95 a month gets you unlimited storage. Cheap insurance for a media which you *know* will fail eventually; it's just a question of when.
Good luck!
Saving crashed harddrives.
by esow0119 - 10/3/08 11:37 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
At this link you will find programs that will save your harddrives content.
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
I purchased a new Harddrive and installed it as C. Built up my system on this new drive. Downloaded and paid for GetDataBack for NTFS and then saved all data on my crashed c-drive that I had installed in a rack for USB. Saved all my data, even on reformatted drives.
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