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

I would suggest you attempt to read that HD by running a different Operating System (Linux-based) from your CD-Rom drive. Try running "UBUNTU," or another similar version of Linux from your CD-Rom drive to read the questionable HD. Linux can "see" Windows files just fine.

To do this, you will have to first enter the BIOS of your machine and change the boot order of your devices so that the CD-Rom drive is read first, before the HD.

UBUNTU and other similar discs are freely available off the net. When running, attempt to find those missing files and live-boat them onto the new HD or a flash memory stick.

GOOD LUCK....HOPE THIS HELPS!

SpinRite by grc.com

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

I have used this program myself to rescue data from three crashed hard drives. It takes quite a long time so be prepared to leave it running over night. Not free but worth every cent when the data is recovered!

Chuck,

A crashed hard drive can be serious issue. The question becomes WHY it crashed. If the hard drive has some kind of "software" failure, like a corrupt partition table, then you can recover it with utilities at home. If, on the other hand, it has a "hardware" failure, such as something blew on a circuit board, you can all but hang it up for at home recovery, because the mechanical failure has to be fixed before it can be read. This is why IT has 3 rules that they live by, 1) Back up all hard drives, 2) Back up all data you don't want to lose, and 3) Back up everything on the computer.

As to what you can do now that the failure has occurred, you can try a few things. You have already done the first, connecting it as a slave drive and trying to read from there. I have had excellent luck with two other tricks. The first is to boot the computer using a Linux Live CD (a version of Linux that runs straight from a CD) and mount the hard drive in Linux, then attempt to move files from the bad drive to a USB drive or memory stick. Linux will quite often read around errors that Windows won't. Doing this you may lose some data, but usually I tend to get about 75% of the data back if anything. If you don't know much about Linux, you may want to look for a friend with Linux experience when attempting this one, because I have always found it necessary to go command line to work around the bad spots, and the skills to do this are beyond a posting on CNET.

The final solution is a software that I have used before that tends to be the best I have found. It is called R-Studio, you can find it at http://www.r-studio.com. It will cost you $50, but I have used it before with great success.

Good luck with the data recovery, and heed my best advice. Once you get things running again, learn from your lesson and develop a backup strategy for the computer.

Most noteworthy is rstudio from r-tt.com. The demo version will allow you to determine if the product will work for the drive. Cost of the software to buy if it is able to recover data is around $50.00

This sounds typical of a virus that got into the Boot Sector of the HD and now the OS can't see it. I had this problem back in the days when we used to use FAT32 for the file system. I have a HD Utility that would then redo the boot sector and then windows would see the drive again. I paid $10 for the Utility CD and the program was PART.exe.
My suggestion would be to scan it connected to an OS or better yet....make a set of floppy Virus scanning tools that you can boot to and then scan the drive. Then get on the web and find some HD Utilities That will handle [I'm guessing you used NTFS for the file system on the HD] an NTFS file system and rewrite the boot sector. Windows should possibly see it again and you will be able to recover your data.

Good Luck.........Nitromerk

http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

Try using a Linux Live CD, when my Seagate 250gb HD died, I put a new 250gb HD in and put the old one in slave, then I booted from the Live CD and it found all of my old files and everything from the old HD and transferred it to the new one. That worked and I recovered all my files that way. Try that.

Chuck,

You don't have to spend a ton of money anymore to save your data from a damaged or corrupted drive. There are two things you can do inexpensively to try to solve the problem.
1. Pick up an external hard drive enclosure into which you can plug your hard drive. Samba's SATA or PATA Enclosure is a good one and will only set you back $30. Plug the now external drive into your computer via the USB connector. If you can read it from there, you are golden. If not, go to step two.
2. Go online and download a free copy of File Scavenger. You can google the name and get it from a variety of sources. It will read your drive and tell you what you will be able to recover. Chances are, you will see everything you want to recover. If you like what you see, pay the $50 for the software and you are back in business.

This $80 remedy is the best deal in the computer business.

If File Scavenger can't pull off the data, chances are you have real structural damage to the drive. In that case, you will have to send the drive off to a company that will carefully tear apart the drive and pull off the data. They should tell you what they can recover before you pay. I have used On Track Data Recovery in the past and they pulled off all my data on a frozen and scratched disk. Be prepared, however, to lay out some serious cash. It's not cheap, but you have to determine what your data is worth.

Good luck to your girl in school and to you, her dad whose hope is to keep her there.

Unfortunately, it sounds as if the HDs solid state circuitry has gone bad...as evidenced by the drive not making a sound. With that being the case, you won't be able to plug it into another port or put it in an enclosure to retrieve the data. To make a long story short, the only way to get the data off of it (relatively cheaply) is to find another drive of the same model.

By that, I mean the same Model #, Part #, and same date. You can find this information on the back of the drive. If you could find one with the same revision number as well, you should be good to go. That can be a tedious task of calling around. Once you have it, technically, it's a matter of replacing the circuit board on the bad drive with the new one. I would recommend taking it to someone knowledgeable in this process as it could ruin both drives if done incorrectly.

The only way I know of other than this would be to send the drive to a steril lab to have the platters removed.....in excess of $700 would be my best guess. Good Luck.

-Joe

With my hard drive, I'm thinking the head might be bad or something. I hear it trying to run, but my computer, as master, slows down and will not load. Does that mean this slave (bad hard drive) has physical damage. Or is had bad mechanical part? My working computer can't load while the bad hard drive is hooked up as secondary.

I am not an expert but I had a similar problem, and of course, my data was not backed up! I was on the phone with multiple tech support people from Dell, which was a frustrating experience. They even came and changed the motherboard in my computer which, as I knew, would not fix the problem. Then I went to the Besty Buy geek squad and they told me that I could pay up to $800 to have data recovered from the drive but I would probably lose a lot of it. I persisted with online searches, sites such as this one, and finally solved the problem. This worked for me and it may work for you. First, do you get that horrid blue screen? If so, there are codes that you can look up to determine where the problem is. Second, boot the computer and get into the DOS prompt and run CHKDSK on the bad drive. This will check the boot sectors and fix them if neccessary. They may not work for you, but it's worth a try. If you have Windows XP you cannot a DOS prompt since it doesn't run on a DOS platform. There is a progam that you can download to access the NTFS disk through DOS. http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm. Before you do this you may want to get other responses because I am not an expert, but my drive is fine and it's been about a year. If you are running Vista, I have no idea. Good luck!

I found a company based in Wisconsin that recovered my data at a very reasonable price. Since then, I have noticed other companies have surfaced that do the same thing - all in the $250-$300 range, which is quite a bit less than the orginal quotes I received in the $1000+ range back in 2005. I used gillware.com and was very pleased. I recommend them. Good luck.

I also experienced the same. The system message said that my hard drive is unreadable, on another instance corrupt and should consider re-installing my disk manager.

Finding it unbelievable, my computer run very slowly afterward,I suspected it was caused by a virus.

What i did that resulted to positive outcome was as follows:

1. I installed an old hard disk (XP2 system) as primary master in the primary cable
2. I installed the defective hard disk (XP 2 System) as slave in a separate cable as primary slave.
3. I replaced the power supply with an older but not defective power supply.
4. After which the defective drive was seen already.
5. All files are in-tact but a slight change was made by the virus in the disk management files settings of DMA.
6 All files are in-tact and i was able to make a back-up.
7 I reformatted the defective drive into 2 drive, One for system and and the other for work files.

There are a lot of virus that can escape protection software's ability to detect. May be because most software defend on large database of definition files which to me is an overhead due to delay of update and slow execution. There are also protection software that do not provide option to protect drives other than the main drive. Very few software are capable of protecting U S B which i consider most vulnerable as virus entry point. No software is capable of protecting from all threats and viruses, I have not known anyone yet.

As for me, I installed two protection software, "Threatfire" is one the other is "Antivir" I find the two compatible and worthy of evaluation and satisfactory so far, there are lot good anti-virus software to choose from, but you should not rely on one alone and should not exceed more than two because of speed consideration. Special care must be taken during installation to determine compatibility. This is not for advertisement but i am speaking based on result of personal evaluation and experience.

I am not suggesting to you to do the same as what I did, but it may help you diagnose the problem and find appropriate solution.

Since you are a student you may find software solutions in http://www.dl4all.com/ not guaranteed

Good luck

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

It has worked when nothing else would -- $69 for FAT ($79 for NTFS) with free updates for life. Take a look

Having replaced several hard drives in recent weeks, my first thought is that you are out of luck. This is especially true if you have already hit the drive with one or more of the "recovery" programs you mentioned and they did work. Sometimes they work and or other times they will make the disk entirely unrecoverable (if it ever even was recoverable).

There are some failures that even the VERY EXPENSIVE data recovery centers can not recover. I had one person that had their PhD thesis on a hard rive that failed. She sent it to a California based recovery service. Their estimated cost, prior to seeing the drive, was $1,700. After they received it and did the preliminary test, they returned it as totally non-recoverable. At least they didn't charge her very much for the inspection. The only thing I could do was install a replacement (empty) drive and start over.

Have you taken a look at the BIOS (PC systems) to see if the disk is even recognized as being present? You would have to boot up and then hit the key specified by the manufacturer (Delete, Escape, Tab, one of the "F"unction keys or perhaps some combination) prior to the Windows program starting. Apple will usually show the presence of a disk if you check the Systems Profile utility when booted from a CD or different hard drive than the failed one.

If the disk does not even appear in Bios or Profile, you are probably dead in the water! The lack of any recognition will make it virtually impossible for the recovery software to even find the disk.

If Bios or Profile does show the disk, at least some of the communications to and from the system's data bus are working. You MIGHT be able to find some data. Disk recovery, usually the first try is the only good effort, might work. If it starts its processing but then fails, you may have just lost most everything.

If the Master Boot Record (the very first file the hard drive will try to read) is just corrupted, you might be able to rebuild it using a disk editor. This is not for the faint of heart or inexperienced user since you will be working with hexadecimal notation and one wrong move can really screw things up. The MBR tells the disk software where to begin looking for the next file called for. If the disk has a hardware failure somewhere in its read or write electronics, you are pretty much dead. A small example of what a MBR looks like is copied from Wikipedia and shown below.
Absolute sector 0 (cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0000 EB 48 90 D0 BC 00 7C FB 50 07 50 1F FC BE 1B 7C .H....|.P.P....|
0010 BF 1B 06 50 57 B9 E5 01 F3 A4 CB BE BE 07 B1 04 ...PW...........
0020 38 2C 7C 09 75 15 83 C6 10 E2 F5 CD 18 8B 14 8B 8,|.u...........
0030 EE 83 C6 10 49 74 16 38 2C 74 F6 BE 10 07 03 02 ....It.8,t......
0040 80 00 00 80 DF 0A 93 01 00 08 FA EA 50 7C 00 00 ............P|..
0050 31 C0 8E D8 8E D0 BC 00 20 FB A0 40 7C 3C FF 74 1....... ..@|<.t


The next set of files looked for are the partition tables. Again, if these are corrupt or missing, the hard drive will not be able to find your file.

Once the MBR has been read correctly, the drive starts looking for the track and sector (portion of the called track) that contains the next bits of data called for. If the "Roadmap" showing where the next file is located is missing or wrong, a disk editor might be able to write the correct data IF YOU KNOW WHERE THE NEXT TRACK AND SECTOR IS. This is usually impossible if there are many tracks. At the end of the data for the first track is information to get to the next track. With one file, say a .DOC file for example, spanning many many tracks and sectors, this may or may not be possible. If there has been writing activity on any of the tracks you need, you have lost pretty much everything since the needed information to locate the next track you need no longer exists.

Sorry to give you such a "Doom & Gloom" scenario but that is pretty much the way it is.

My favorite saying comes to mind. "There are two types of computer users. Those who know what the term 'Backup' means and do and those, who at some point it time, wish they did!" I am afraid that you are probably in the second group.