Community Newsletter: Q&A: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive?

Read about SpinRite 6.0!

In reply to: Ways to recover data from a corrupt hard drive? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

Have a look into Hiren’s BootCD or dexter’s SuperBoot CD, they contain an exceptional software collection of all kinds of tools including SpinRite 6.0 and HDD Regenerator, the list is very long. It is highly recommended for every one. I think many people will like SpinRite after reading about how it works and what it does with your data!

SpinRite 6.0 or HDD Regenerator can take several days! to recover bad sectors. So do not hesitate to leave SpinRite working for couple of days. In my case (160GB drive) SpinRite completed in 73 hours! with thousands of recovered sectors, then I re run HDD Regenerator couple of times and in every subsequent step I got less number of recovered sectors.

If you have few important documents and non of the recovery methods worked for you, then possibly you have a corrupted file allocation table or cross linked files, then you may need to set down with your daughter and ask her about any phrase she wrote in those documents and then search the disk by using a Disk editor looking for that phrase and with the help of FAT table or a copy of the FAT table you can start building those few documents sector by sector, however you will get many older versions of those documents, I think at least she can get one older version but not so old (she wrote during editing). When people save documents, the OS write a new copy at a different physical space leaving the old version data in place, many of us used this method in the 80’s when HD drives are only 20 megabytes.

For Pictures, you can do the same by the same disk editor and looking for Jpeg file signatures (or read about JPEG standard file format) you can locate the starting sector for every picture and with the help of the FAT table you can rebuild those pictures sector by sector.