HDD Recovery, I Need Help Please

[MorphiousVylok]

Hi, I'm currently working on recovering some files from my 250gb Maxtor HardDrive and was wondering what program is best for a drive with horribly bad sectors. I had a few problems with my big drives in the past with losing information due to the 140gb barrier; but this time i'm not sure how the problem started. One day I was on my computer and it just froze; I restarted and then it said "A Disk Read Error Occurred, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" So it won't boot up. So I put a new hard drive in so that I could read the Maxtor and try to recover files. There is a problem though... In previous situations with my drives not booting up, the files were usually still whole files and I could recover nearly all of them. But this time they are broken files and nearly non of the music files are what they used to be; Almost as if chkdisk got a hold of them and orphaned them. But it never went to chkdisk. So I really need to know what program would be best to repair bad sectors/or something that would hopefully repair my files. Right now I'm using File Scavenger version 2.1; and it finds nearly everything, but when I "recover" them... they are heavily damaged, and not alot of files actually work. Now... I am just using Exhaustive Search; I did try defunct volume search once but I didn't set any advanced options because I don't really know what all that is. If some of you could please help me out I would highly appreciate it. Thanks!

[XOR != OR]

The bad news is you are probably screwed. Physical defects ( which this sounds like ) are terribly hard to recover from, usually requiring outside help from specialized companies ( who charge rates rumplestiltskin would balk at ).

If those two apps aren't helping, it may be time to start the grieving process. The only other thing I'd try is dd under linux. Hook up another 250g drive and try to image the old on to the new. There are a few options that will help get past the bad sectors, but I honestly wouldn't put any faith in that working.

[S1nF1xx]

Yep, as was said physical defects usually mean RIP.

The good thing is that you only said your music was gone. It can all be replaced. Just take this as your hard learned lesson on why you should do backups. In my early days I learned by losing stuff that was much more important. :(

[dbwillis]

You can try getdataback from runtime.org, it will show you what it can recover before you need to purchase it.
I purchased it and it recovered over 30gb of MP3's from the bosses PC, man was she happy!
I think it was like $25

[MorphiousVylok]

Well I've been searching the internet for people who had this problem: "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart."

It turns out that the solution in some cases had to do with the Bios; for some people reseting the bios to defaults did the trick. But I tried it and it didn't work for me. Now... I don't know what their situations where, but for me... I have a 250GB Maxtor HDD and have 235GB used on the drive. The error message just popped up the other day after my PC froze and I rebooted. I've had previous occations of data loss due to the 140GB Barrier; but this time with my HDD I made sure to update my OS and some other things to make sure that didn't happen again. I have been using it past 140GB safely for some time now, but then this happend. So could this be due to my Bios not being able to read the large 235GB Partition now? I have an Asus P4P800 Motherboard, with a Bios that reads "v2.51 Copyright 1985-2002 American Megatrends Inc." Would updating my Bios help this problem? If anyone knows anything about this situation please help me out. Thanks!

[dbwillis]

What does the BIOS show for the hard drive size? if it shows the full 250gb, then your OK, if it shows only 132gb or something like that, maybe the chipset doesnt support large HDD's

[MorphiousVylok]

I just checked and It does show that it's a 250gb drive. I think I'm going to try updating my bios and if it won't boot up after that... maybe use Bootit NG or something to get it booted... And see if I can still vew my files correctly; If anyone has a solution though please let me know thank you!