Community Newsletter: Q&A: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive?
- 10/10/08 3:51 PM
Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive
by ostrowlaw - 10/5/08 5:42 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had the exact same problem with my daughter's laptop hard drive, I pulled it out, tested it, it was D.O.A. I found a great guy who works from his house, he is extremely reasonably priced, he pulled my data off for $150.00 and emailed it to me and sent a DVD. Here's his address: http://www.datarecoverynj.com/
We are in NJ so we actually drove over to where he lives on a Saturday night, and by Monday we had all the date back.
Good luck.
Alan
Hard Drive Recovery
by Investigator1 - 10/5/08 7:17 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The answer to your question may well be that your daughter is a college student. Many colleges, 2 and 4 year, have computer degree programs. Many of the programs include classes in data recovery. If she can find a student in that class maybe they can take her on as a homework project. I have seen it done at the local colleges in my area and it appears to work well. The work is done free to very cheap with top of the line programs. May also look around for a local Tech school and try the same. Like going to a beauty school for a make over and not paying the top price.
recover data
by erhan aselcioglu - 10/5/08 7:27 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I've heard a very good SW, but never tried it : Stellar Phoenix.
check the site: www.stellarinfo.com
retrieving data from "invisable hard drive"
by georgias girl - 10/5/08 9:10 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Chuck, I had a similar problem. I had a 160 and a 200 main hard drive. I messed up through using a registry cleaner and had to reinstall windows xp on the 200 drive. After doing so, my computer wouldn't show or acknowlege my 160 drive. My grandson installed Linux on a partitioned part of my 200 drive and Linux showed the 160 drive and everything on it. I copied each file and pasted it on my main drive.After I retrieved everything, My grandson partitioned my 160 into two 80 gbite drives and I installed Linux permanently on one as it's really handy to repair window problems as Linux will show all drives.Windows wouldn't recognize it because it was too big of a drive. After we retrieved everything and formatted it to two 80's windows acknowlged it. Hope this helps Georgias girl
Hard Drive of Daughter crash
by texmet - 10/5/08 1:20 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The first thing to do is seal the hard drive in ziplock freezer bag and put in the freezer overnight. This will help with the data recovery. Take it out and hook it up as a slave but be sure reset the pins on the drive so that is in slave mode rather than master mode. This should help.
Texmet
Corrupted hard drive?
by sborsher - 10/5/08 2:23 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Well, you hope its not corrupted. If you are lucky, the electronics are at fault, in which case you could swap the disc assy with another set of electronics. I have recovered data from dead drives by doing just that, as I have multiples versions of drives collected over the years, which I use for archiving a large collection of videos. A truly corrupted hard drive would be very expensive to recover and would never be 100% recoverable. There is also a possibility that the drive bearings are frozen. There is an urban myth, I call it a myth because it has never worked for me, where putting the drive in a freezer for a short time (insulated from moisture, of course) can release the bearing for long enough to get the disc turning, and once turning can be recovered in one session; one session only as the rest of this myth says it only works once.
Ubuntu or Knoppix
by norry326 - 10/5/08 3:04 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
These 2 programs are self loading from disk. They are free downloads. Knoppix is the easier one. This should let you see the other drive, unless its totally knackered. You may have to make it the main drive again not slave.
Goo Luck
Norry Strachan
DATE RECOVERY
by menglermangala - 10/5/08 7:57 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I HAD SOME EXPERANCE SAME AS YOU.BUT I USED SMART RECOVERY FOR THIS.IT'S GAVE VERY GOOD OUTPUT FOR ME.
Recovering data from a corrupt hard drive
by mrgee63 - 10/5/08 9:15 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Try "GetDataBack" from http://www.runtime.org/ I used this program a couple of years ago & it recovered ALL of the data on the crashed drive. You need to install the "broken" drive in another computer with the same operating system, and it takes some time to copy the data over. Cost was a whole lot less than quoted by the professional recovery lab, and I finished it in one day.
SpinRight from grc.com was made for this
by trdaggett - 10/5/08 9:22 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Chuck, it's good that your daughter didn't hear any 'noises' when the hard drive stopped working. SpinRight 6.0 from Gibson Research Corporation has been the best and the most successful utility for identifying and repairing HDD issues that I've ever heard about.
If the hard drive isn't physically damaged there's an excellent chance that running SpinRight on it will find the problem(s) and correct them, allowing the drive to be booted normally.
This program is not free, it's $89.00 US, but compared to paying big $$$ to some 'recovery' company the price is minuscule.
Every week on his "SecurityNow!" netcast Steve Gibson (the developer of SpinRight and many other excellent utilities at grc.com) starts the show with email from SpinRight users telling about how their 'dead' hard drives were brought back to life after running SpinRight on them. Note that SpinRight does much more than the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring technology, as it actively identifies and FIXES issues that cause HDDs to 'die'.
Just go to the site and get the program, adapt it to your needs (burn to floppy, CD/DVD, flash drive, per the directions/documentation*), boot the disk and let the program run. Be aware that this process can take quite a while and that's normal.
This program probably not for newbies, but I think many/most people can read the documentation and run the program with no problems.
Chuck and everyone else, do yourself a favor and check out SpinRight before you give up on a hard drive/PC issue. It's cheaper than a new drive, plus you don't lose all those valuable files on the drive.
- And if some 'Tech' at the store where you bought your PC/hard drive tells you a hard drive is bad and needs to be replaced, *I* wouldn't do it unless you know it was physically damaged or you don't care about saving what's on it. The store wants to sell a new HDD not tell you how you could fix it.
Afterwards take a moment to send Steve Gibson/GRC/SecurityNow! an email about your experience!
My experience has been that for some reason SpinRight isn't that well known, even though it's been around (and proving itself) for many years.
Good luck Chuck, and don't worry, the odds are excellent that your daughter's drive will be fine after running SpinRight.
TR Daggett
FYI-
Pre-purchase info page: http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm
recovery
by laucian.nailo - 10/5/08 10:38 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Chuck,
I recently had a hard drive data recovery issue my self. After speaking with some professionals, they told me to see if Windows recognizes the drive. To do this make sure the drive is plugged in and boot into Windows. Once in Windows right click on My Computer selecting "Manage". In the window that pops up select "Disk Management". You should see several drives listed. Now if your drive is recognized it will say something along the lines of "Unrecognized Drive". This means there is no physical issue with the drive, which is good for us because then the data can be recovered using software. However, if it doesn't than the only way to recover the data is by paying upwards of $1400 for recovery. But, for now I will assume it will recognize.
Now there are several programs out there that claim to be able to recover data, as you have no doubt realized. You have also found out that you get what you pay for. What you also should realize is that some data may be unrecoverable do to the fact that information has been overwritten. I did some searching and researching and found Easus (http://www.ptdd.com/) to have quality software at reasonable prices. They even offer student discounts. They offer software that recovers data off of drives to software that will recover your masterboot record and partition table, the information that tells the computer how to interpret the information and where the drive starts and stops. I have seen many recommendations but this company comes up again and again with good reviews.
Now, I have to address this just to be thorough. If Windows does not recognize there is a drive installed then the drive is physically bad and requires professional recovery. To find a data reovery professional, visit the manufacturer's website for your drive and search for "data recovery".
Hope this helps and good luck.
Jake
corrupt?
by fabianhow - 10/5/08 11:20 PM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
If the hard drive is corrupted but the hardware is working, try this command in cmd
chkdsk <drive letter>: /r
This repairs the hard drive but some data might be lost. If you want to check for errors but not repair yet, use the same command without the /r.
Hope this helps.
Tried R-Studio?
by theimr - 10/6/08 6:00 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had very good luck doing data recovery (my 1st time) using R-Studio. Was able to recover 99% of lost files from my wife's PC.
http://www.r-studio.com/
Spinning up a drive that is physically broken, though, may be a taller order. It sounded from your email like the drive does power up so perhaps you still have a shot trying software solutions.
This is no help now of course but I would suggest avoiding this problem in the future by subscribing to an automated remote server backup like Mozy. It has given me unbelievable peace of mind.
Mike
Data Recovery from a HD
by pllam - 10/6/08 6:01 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
This is something we deal with here daily. The answer is really how much is the data worth.
There are many ways to get the data off the drive depending on what is really wrong with the drive. If the data is worth the cost of recovery go to the best, www.ontrack.com. If anyone can get it they can. Do not mess around with software and other methods, everything you do to the drive could make recovery harder.
If you don't want to pay then you can
>Swap the circuit board for an exact duplicate of the drive, but that means buying another drive. This will work only if its not a physical problem. But you have to buy a drive.
>put the drive into the freezer for an hour or two and see if works after that, get the data off asap you only have a few minutes.
>just before you give up and toss the drive give it a whack with the palm of your hand, hey, you were going to throw it away anyway.
DO NOT FREEZE OR WHACK THE DRIVE These are last resort methods.
If you give up DO NOT throw the drive away, destroy it.
ONLINE BACKUP
by QuadFather - 10/6/08 7:23 AM In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
There's lots of talk about free recovery programs and backup harddrives ... Here's another great option that I recently put into use:
Carbonite. This is a small program that uploads an unlimited amount of your data to a server, where it can be downloaded from in the event of, say, a harddrive failure.
$50 a year. That's per YEAR. For unlimited space? You can't beat it. They don't even require a credit card for your trial run. That's a small price to pay for a great sense of security.
Just put a ".com" on the end of the name.
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