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Data Recovery - Suggestions needed

T

thesmelliestsock.

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 6, 2003
Messages
1,213
Hey guys,

I have my friends external HDD which we removed from its enclosure because the USB connector broke. It wasn't dropped or anything, the solder connection just broke. I figured by hooking it up with a transfer cable we should have no issues removing the data, but when I connected the drive to my computer it came up in Disk Management as unallocated space. I neither initialized the drive nor formatted it, so I'm really hoping the data is still there but I've tried a few partition recovery tools with no luck. I am currently using software by EaseUS to attempt a recovery but it's been scanning for a few hours and has yet to find anything.

Does anyone have any favored tools or suggestions? The data is very important to him and if he has to he is willing to send it out to a lab for recovery but we were hoping to avoid that expensive service.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I don't want to do anything with the drive to further reduce the chances of recovering the data unless I am advised to by the [H]ard professionals.

Thanks guys
 
·PitBuLL·;1039530189 said:
The data is very important to him and if he has to he is willing to send it out to a lab for recovery but we were hoping to avoid that expensive service.
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Since there's no physical damage done to the platter heads (logical damage) it won't be unreachably expensive or hard. They'll just plug the drive to a PC-3000 data recovery PCI card, do it's settings and image his drive to an another drive.

Though, they still want a good $100 for that shit. Data centers are such expensive shit.
 
I've seen something similar on Seagate external drives. It's weird. It really needs the USB board it came with. I'd try to just solder the USB connector back on. If that doesn't work, I'd try to find another working one to swap out the drives.

There may be some easier way. Hopefully someone knows. You shouldn't have to send it to a recovery service though.
 
johnnydoe said:
Since there's no physical damage done to the platter heads (logical damage) it won't be unreachably expensive or hard. They'll just plug the drive to a PC-3000 data recovery PCI card, do it's settings and image his drive to an another drive.

Though, they still want a good $100 for that shit. Data centers are such expensive shit.
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$100 isn't unreasonable for the importance of data to him. Who provides such a service?
 
·PitBuLL·;1039530206 said:
$100 isn't unreasonable for the importance of data to him. Who provides such a service?
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Any GOOD data center would do. Personally, your best bet would be one of those that ALWAYS recover the datas of hospitals, police departments etc. they know their shit well.

And make sure you or your friend go there and do the shit face to face with the guy, or else they might fuck the drive up on purpose and charge you more at the end of the day. They even go as far as doing that kind of shit like filling the drive with zeros to rip you off.
 
kumquat said:
I've seen something similar on Seagate external drives. It's weird. It really needs the USB board it came with. I'd try to just solder the USB connector back on. If that doesn't work, I'd try to find another working one to swap out the drives.

There may be some easier way. Hopefully someone knows. You shouldn't have to send it to a recovery service though.
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Interesting... I wondered to myself if it had something to do with the enclosure.
 
I use EASEUS Data recovery wizard thingy.... totally freaking worked for me when I accidentally formatted an entire 750GB hard drive.
 
tangoseal said:
I use EASEUS Data recovery wizard thingy.... totally freaking worked for me when I accidentally formatted an entire 750GB hard drive.
Click to expand...

It's now found 20 files so far but it's early in the scan. I wish it would show me file names as it went along.

When you recovered your information, were the file names or locations intact?
 
·PitBuLL·;1039530244 said:
It's now found 20 files so far but it's early in the scan. I wish it would show me file names as it went along.

When you recovered your information, were the file names or locations intact?
Click to expand...

If the drive is fucked up with bad sectors, then you lose the file names and they're shown in HEX bits such as 99955hx22567 etc.

Since your drive is completely fine "physically", your data is there just as you last left it.
 
That'll be good. Little extra bit, I took advantage of USB 3.0 for the first time. I had it plugged in to a 2.0 port and the ETA was 12 hours for recovery, only then to realize that his enclosure was 3.0 and switched the port. 4 hours recovery instead :)
 
How big is the drive, make/model of drive, what are the system specs of the system you connected it to (ie does it support GPT?), is it possible to connect it straight to the motherboard instead of a "transfer cable", what o/s was the friend using the drive with (Windows? OSX?). The fact its showing as unallocated may be as simple as an addressing/translation problem or partition type your recovery system's o/s doesn't support.

More details would be helpful, because a USB connector just happening to break at the same time a drive goes bad or partition table is lost is quite the coincidence, unless the thing was dropped and/or your friend isn't telling you everything about what transpired before he put it in your hands.

If it were me, first thing I do is create a raw image dump, then try testdisk to see if it any partitions tables can be found and take it from there. I'd first want to know determine *why* the drive is showing as unallocated space, before jumping straight to the last resort option which is scanning for lost files.
 
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odditory said:
How big is the drive, make/model of drive, what are the system specs of the system you connected it to (ie does it support GPT?), is it possible to connect it straight to the motherboard instead of a "transfer cable". This could all come down to a translation problem with the way its being addressed.

More details would be helpful, because a USB connector just happening to break at the same time a drive goes bad is quite the coincidence, unless the thing was dropped and/or your friend isn't telling you everything about what all transpired before he put it in your hands.

If it were me, first thing I do is create a raw image dump, then try testdisk to see if it any partitions tables can be found and take it from there. The first step is understanding WHY its showing as unallocated space before assuming that scanning for lost files is the only option, which it is not, its only a last resort.
Click to expand...

The drive is 1TB in size, according to the EaseUS software it is a "WDC WD10 EADS-11M2B1". What would you like to know about my system to determine whether or not it supports GPT? I guess I could connect it directly to the board. The recovery has a little under 4 hours left on it, I'll let it run its course for now and see what I come up with before I proceed.
 
My friend did just inform me that this drive was being used on a Mac with a more recent version of OSX. I am not quite sure what type of formatting he was using.
 
:headdesk: :)

Install the drive in a cheap 3.5" enclosure and send him on his way.
 
Well you need to figure out why, because there's still an addressing problem. Maybe there's an incompatibility between his Mac and the chipset of the new USB enclosure you're trying. Again, a drive does not simply lose its partition table because a USB connector breaks on the enclosure.

But at least you know now that scanning for lost NTFS files on a drive formatted HFS+ by a Mac is barking up the wrong tree.
 
odditory said:
Well you need to figure out why, because there's still an addressing problem. Maybe there's an incompatibility between his Mac and the chipset of the new USB enclosure you're trying. Again, a drive does not simply lose its partition table because a USB connector breaks on the enclosure.

But at least you know now that scanning for lost NTFS files on a drive formatted HFS+ by a Mac is barking up the wrong tree.
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Haha can of worms man, can of worms. If I "initialize" the drive but don't format it, what would happen then?
 
·PitBuLL·;1039530360 said:
Haha can of worms man, can of worms. If I "initialize" the drive but don't format it, what would happen then?
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That will wipe the Mac GPT partition table and replace it with a blank MBG partition table, i.e.: don't do it.
 
So after doing some digging, I read that most external enclosures will overwrite the existing partition tables when a drive is connected to them. I'm pretty pissed at myself because I do actually have a transfer cable which I could have used first which may have prevented this whole mess in the first place.

My friend is going to bring me his MacBook, and I'm going to try to run a pdisk command via the terminal on the drive which allegedly can fix/rewrite and HFS+ partition table. I'll post back on here with results and I'm hoping for the best!
 
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johnnydoe said:
Ya right, docking stations are the way to go.
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I completely agree now. I consider myself to be fairly computer savvy, but there are certain realms that I need more help in than others. In this case, I would have NEVER expected that simply plugging a drive in to an external enclosure would overwrite the partition tables. Damnit all!
 
·PitBuLL·;1039531293 said:
So after doing some digging, I read that most external enclosures will overwrite the existing partition tables when a drive is connected to them.
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FUD. Where did you read this?
 
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