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OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83000 02/26/05 01:22 AM
Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 5,422
axiomite
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axiomite
Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 5,422
I have tried just about everything that I can think of, but my 14 month old, 160GB Western Digital drive just won't read. I tried the Western Digital diagnostics software, and it says that it failed the Read portion of the S.M.A.R.T. stuff. I tried scan disk, even a bunch of disk tools on one of the popular Ultimate Boot CDs, and still no go. I can see portions of the disk with a sector reader, but I really need something that will read whatever files it can from the drive and let me dump them to another drive. ANY hints would be great. I usually am able to get Norton Disk Doctor, or Scandisk, or some other readily available tool to work, but this one has me stumped.

All I want are some digital photos from Christmas, and our TurboTax files, so it isn't like I am looking to get everything off of the drive, and I realize that I may have limited success.

Thanks!


Farewell - June 4, 2020
Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83001 02/26/05 02:34 PM
Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 828
aficionado
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aficionado
Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 828
i would try to ghost the drive to another drive. you can use norton ghost but if there is a lot of errors it may not work. another program not as user friendly is novastor recovery, it has been able to clone a lot of drives that were bad.
Jake


------------------------------------------------
Leave the gun, Take the canolis.
Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83002 02/26/05 04:15 PM
Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 418
devotee
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devotee
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Posts: 418
If you've got any older DOS 5.0, 6.0, or Win98 boot floppies laying around, I have something that might be able to help. I've used it with great success and it can't hurt even if it does not help.

Boot up on one of these older boot floppies, and do a dir on it to see if "fdisk.exe" is on it. If it is, try this command: "fdisk /mbr". When you hit enter there will be a brief pause and hopefully, you will go quietly back to a command prompt. If the drive has a problem you might get an error. If you got no output at all, it worked. This command overwrites the first 34 blocks on the disk that contain the media descriptor file, and a few other pointers and such, but none of the actual data on the disk. It can not cause a problem, since this data is always the same on any system with a standard BIOS chip. Sometimes it gets corrupted, and the system will just flat out not try to use the drive. There's no error message because the OS has no idea that the disk exists - it is "turned off" before the machine ever tries to load the OS.

S.M.A.R.T is a piece of software on the disk drive's controller card that monitors bad blocks and other statistics. The data can be used by the controller and software in the PC to predict failures if it is turned on. If the diagnostic SW says "failed Read" when testing S.M.A.R.T., then either the drive itself is not responding to the test, the drive can't read the statistics from it's own memory, or S.M.A.R.T. is disabled (usually a jumper on the drive). If the drive has a jumper to do so, disable it. Then go into the BIOS setup on your PC, and disable it there, too. That will rule out S.M.A.R.T. as the problem.

Do yourself a favor - try a different ribbon cable before you knock yourself out too much. They do go bad for no apparent reason and most people never suspect them.


M- M60s/VP150/QS8s/SVS PC-Ultra/HK630 Sit down. Shut up. Listen.
Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83003 02/26/05 04:34 PM
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 6,379
Likes: 7
axiomite
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axiomite
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 6,379
Likes: 7
Glad someone is jumping in here. The rest of us are just looking at the thread and feeling bad 'cause we don't know how to help.


M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83004 02/26/05 04:38 PM
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 5,745
Likes: 17
axiomite
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axiomite
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 5,745
Likes: 17
I've used a program from Ontrack called Easy Recovery that worked quite well for me in the past.


"Those who preach the myths of audio are ignorant of truth."
Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83005 02/26/05 08:58 PM
Joined: Feb 2005
Posts: 36
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Feb 2005
Posts: 36
Try SpinRite at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Seems to have worked for some I know.

Good luck!

Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83006 02/27/05 05:53 AM
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 2,185
connoisseur
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connoisseur
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 2,185
I think spinrite might be worth it too. Seems a lot of Tivo users also use it on drives that cause stuttering. Appears to be a viable workaround.

Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83007 02/27/05 06:26 AM
Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 5,422
axiomite
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axiomite
Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 5,422
IT'S FIXED, well not really, but at least I was able to get files off of the old drive.

I posted a message very early this morning about this, and I have a good memory of posting, but the message isn't here, so maybe I was dreaming due to lack of sleep.

I couldn't clone the drive because it was a 160GB drive and the closest I have to that is 100GB. I couldn't use a partition tool to adjust the size of the image since there was so much corruption on the drive, so that option was out. Compression didn't work either.

I also couldn't use an old DOS disk because of the large disk size and NTFS format on the drive. Plus I didn't want to do anything that would actually write to the drive.

Then I tried my Ultimate Boot CD again and looked at more tools on it for data recovery, and at about 11:30PM last night, after 2 full evenings of trying all sorts of tricks with no luck, I found a tool that actually saw some of the data on the drive. It was only the folders on the root of the drive, but it was something, and that something gave me the motivation to keep trying.

The tool kept erroring out when trying to go any deeper than just the folders on the corupted drive, and it was the most recent version. I looked up the error code, and while others on the internet had the same problem, there was no clear answer for how to get around it.

Then I started looking into non-free software. It was just before midnight that I came across a program called Active Undelete. I ran it, and it not only saw my folders on the root of the drive, but also sub-folders and files. Granted, it did hit a whole slew of bad sectors and took a while to scan the drive for files, it was the first sign that I may actually get data back after trying over 40 different tricks and software pieces over the course of about 14 hours up to that point.

I used Active Undelete to restore a small .txt file since the demo was limited to files smaller than 64KB in size, and sure enough, it was valid. SO I needed to get a licensed copy and see what happens. Within minutes I had it and installed it from my Ultimate Boot CD O/S session.

Again, it had to scan past all of the errors, but by about 12:30AM, I was recovering data that I thought I would never see again. Heck, I was even recovering data that I had deleted back in May 2004. I didn't realize it until I had restored a couple thousand old files, so I just let them go.

I monitored the progress and could only go a folder (and it's sub-folders) at a time, and since I didn't want the ENTIRE drive, I had to pick only certain folders, wait until they were recovered, and select another folder. I think that it was about 4AM before I fell asleep, and then it was a couple more "sessions" this morning copying more data off, but I think that I now have all of it.

I tried, through the course of this, all of the things that were recomended here, most before they were posted, and they simply didn't work. I do GREATLY appreciate the help that everyone offered, and I am sure that what was recomended works in many other situations, but just not mine because of the high amount of damage on the drive.
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!




Farewell - June 4, 2020
Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83008 02/27/05 02:08 PM
Joined: Feb 2005
Posts: 36
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Feb 2005
Posts: 36
Glad to hear that worked out. Hate it when a hard drive goes out! Can be extremely frustrating. I have two HD's on my machine and I almost always have a relatively recent image of one on the other. You could also look at going to a redundant RAID type system in the future now that HD's are relatively cheap.

Re: OT: Need hard drive recovery tips
#83009 02/28/05 03:46 AM
Joined: Oct 2002
Posts: 1,041
connoisseur
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connoisseur
Joined: Oct 2002
Posts: 1,041
I used to use Ontrack for those odd recovery job. Can you post a link to that utility tool.

Thanks

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