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HD recovery

D

Drake

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2002
Messages
1,056
Hey all,

About a week ago, my HD died out of nowhere. chkdsk/scandisk/recovery console can't see the drive, and 'fdisk /mbr' results in a message telling me the mbr was not updated. Programs from ontrack.com and runtime.org seem to be able to scan the drive, but not much more. Any scanning attempt results in a slew of errors, but with runtime's DiskExplorer I can see hex values about 65% through the drive, and that's about how full it was, so I can only assume my data is still there.

I'm currently trying out TestDisk. It looks promising, but I'm not quite sure it will work.

Any suggestions anyone? And please, spare the backup lectures :(
 
try the ultimatebootcd from ultimatebootcd.com, many utils you may find helpful on that cd.

if all else fails id suggest getting file scavenger to recover that information. its a very small but effective program.
 
Eh... That didn't work.

Any tips on recovering files from a *formatted* drive? I have an 80GB with a pre-2004 backup, but it's been formatted.
 
that would mean what?

Is the drive recognized?
and you tried File Scavenger, but it was unable to find anything?

its a direct sector by sector scanner, so if it found nothing
either, someone zeroed your HDD or its not properly recognized
 
hey bro, yeah file scavenger don't work well, that's why it's free. Maybe it does, not knocking the moderator, but it didn't work for me anyway. Check this out though!! Download and get "restorer2000 professional". It's 50 bucks. The trial version is just a demo and won't recover anything over 64kb. The same thing happened to me this weekend that has happened to you. Windows couldn't see my drive, ect. Then I got windows to view it but then I couldn't access it, ect. This actually happened to me a couple of times. The first time I didn't format my drive, I just installed the restorer software and it automatically located my drive that windows couldn't see, then it scanned my drive and found ALL of my files, and then I recovered them. Simple as that.

The other time this happened to me I was messing around with partition manager and screwed up my paritions, mft, and boot record completely. my drive was litterally screwed. It was so screwed that even when i ran the scan from the recovery software, it would only notice 37mb of the 82mb hard drive. therefore i couldn't see all of my files only part of them. So what did I do? I recovered what I could and then formatted my hard drive. Reinstalled the drive into the system and ran the recovery software again. This time it was able to read all 82gigs and guess what? EVEN AFTER THE FORMAT, 85% of my files were STILL there and I recovered them ALL. Not kidding at all. I use this stuff on a regular basis now it's crazy, because I'm alway fooling around with stuff and messing my drives up. So, I'm constantly recovering my stuff right back. Be careful though, because you WILL lose stuff that can't be recovered. So a permanent backup of your data is always best. If you have to format again by chance before you recover your files, DO NOT do a FULL format. Just do a quick format that only formats the first 300mb and last 100mb of the drive. Then you can still recover everything. I did a FULL drive format once and ran the software and only 10% of my files were left behind. You know you're doing the full format because it takes hours versus minutes for the quick one. Let us know what happens, or drop me an email man if you need some help or something if you know what I mean.
 
A. File Scavenger isnt free :p ($40)
B. Restorer 2000 is just $30 if you get either the NTFS or the FAT32 version, but for both it $50

and

I have both A. & B. :p

and from my experience A. is better

you may have confused it with File Recovery? which is freeware

however, until the HDD is recognized both are 100% useless
the circuit board is more than likely fried, you could swap it out with a compatible one but youd have to buy another HDD

and keep in mind there are changes within model lines
ergo
WD400BB-00DEA0
and
WD400BB-00CAA0

may or maynot be compatible
the closer the manufacturing date the better the odds
but, Id advise getting a definitive list from the manufacturers support before buying (most likely off ebay, and youll need to contact the seller for the full model codes)

follow strict ESD precautions when swapping out the circuit boards, and make sure the drive is spinning up before buying, if not the board might not do any good


other things to try before going to those lengths (to get it recognized)
swap out cables, try cable select for the jumper, swap out power supplies, power less components

until the drive is recognized all software is useless
Good luck
 
you may have confused it with File Recovery? which is freeware
Click to expand...

ahhhh yes. Totally, my mistake sorry about that. I realized that when I got into bed last night, because I have both too. I was really tired. File Recovery is the one that I was talking about. Yeah, File Scavenger 2.1 is good cause it lets you sort your stuff into the original folders unlike 2.0. Though I have to say though, when I messed up my partitions the last time, out of the two, I tried file scavenger first and tried to recover some stuff and it took way too long just to recover a couple of files, then when they came back they weren't even fully recovered so they were useless. Then I tried restorer2000 pro and it recovered all of those files in completeness and some and the recovery process was INCREDIBLY faster. That's just my experience though. :)
 
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