help recovering data?

S

spressa112

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 23, 2005
Messages
422
Long story short: (hard drive is a wd10eacs - made aug 2008)

1) was burning a few files for my friend
2) pc froze
3) waited for pc to unfreeze to the the point where mouse didn't even move anymore for 20 minutes
4) restarted computer
5) disk read error
6) figured it would be a bad partition table or something so went to sleep
7) been wanting to format so.....i waited til this morning to mess with it
8) put in a bartpe cd and was just gonna extract everything to an external
9) bios detects hard drive
10) goes into bootdisk but explorerxp (off of my bartpe cd) cannot find the disk (also says that the file size is unknown)
11) i run testdisk, active@ partition recovery and i can see my files on the drive but sadly...these programs don't let me extract them
12) put the hard drive in an external and windows wants me to format drive to use it (sign of a bad partition table)
13) go into partition recovery but boot size is identical so i don't want to overwrite and maybe lose the indexing (i don't have a floppy to back this up to)
14)currently running getdataback and putting it into images......(getting a error23 at what seems like a pretty good chunk at one section of the hard drive.....i don't think i can recover this area can i?)

I really want to recover this data as it is everything i've done in the past 3 months (pictures, music, work files, etc.) I usually back up every month but i've been extremely lazy. ironic thing is, before the crash last night.....i told my friends i should back up tonight but they insisted on going out and come home to game......does anyone know how i can use something like active@ partition recovery to restore just certain files?
 
i've used the freezer method:
...........
hard disk to wrapping paper, secure with large rubber band, freezer hour
rush to ide connector (2nd channel ) , 10 minutes of more-readable-than-previous, copy files off
hard disk back to freezer for half hour...
.............
recovered 90 percent of the files that way.
 
The freezer method only works when the problem is a mechanical issue.. This sounds more like a data corruption issue, but if you keep the drive dry, freezing it won't hurt it.
 
yah,did freezer method.....it's a mechanical issue, however, freezer method didn't help. just quickscanned with getdata back and grabbed the stuff i needed urgently. Just rewrote down everything i think i can dl again. i think one of my platters is bad. i saved all my work files and pictures (give or take a 50-100 pictures - better than losing the 1200 i had) however, it seems anyhting i had over 20 mb's is fucked - that's about 400gb-500gb's of movies and tv shows for the past three months....oh well, i can get that stuff back

thanks for your help.
 
I have a data recovery question, a friend had their laptop crash, I'm trying to fix it for them. It was a NTFS.SYS bluescreen before boot, I figured the XP had just borked itself so I did a reinstall, when I got to the desktop all their pictures were gone. They had a lot of their baby and this was all they cared what happened. tinkering around I made the XP stop booting. I ran spinrite and the drive has a couple bad blocks, but I'm not getting any clicking, and the bad blocks are towards the end of the drive where no data is at.

It's a Laptop and I have no converter so I'm unable to remove it and hook it to my PC to try the recovery with PhotoRec. I don't want to reinstall XP again and risk overwritting the files either. So what I'm looking for is a program, even if it costs money where I can create a boot disc on my box that will boot into a recovery program and will be able to hopefully find the files and write them to an external USB drive I'll have hooked up to the Laptop. I know reinstalling XP (didn't format) might have made recoverying the pictures iffy at best but at this point I'm willing to try anything.
 
quebert said:
I have a data recovery question, a friend had their laptop crash, I'm trying to fix it for them. It was a NTFS.SYS bluescreen before boot, I figured the XP had just borked itself so I did a reinstall, when I got to the desktop all their pictures were gone. They had a lot of their baby and this was all they cared what happened. tinkering around I made the XP stop booting. I ran spinrite and the drive has a couple bad blocks, but I'm not getting any clicking, and the bad blocks are towards the end of the drive where no data is at.

It's a Laptop and I have no converter so I'm unable to remove it and hook it to my PC to try the recovery with PhotoRec. I don't want to reinstall XP again and risk overwritting the files either. So what I'm looking for is a program, even if it costs money where I can create a boot disc on my box that will boot into a recovery program and will be able to hopefully find the files and write them to an external USB drive I'll have hooked up to the Laptop. I know reinstalling XP (didn't format) might have made recoverying the pictures iffy at best but at this point I'm willing to try anything.
Click to expand...

Did you reformat when you reinstalled? If so, the data is basically gone. You can try getdata back or PhotoRec, but.. it's not likley to find it all. You have to do a repair install if you are trying to keep the data intact.
 
Wouldn't the actual data still be there if he only did a quickformat?
I mean, the partition tables are probably long gone, but the actual binary data
might still be floating around there. Assuming it was a quickformat.

If it was a full format... then yeah, probably no chance.
I use R-studio for file recovery.
 
I didn't do a repair install (wouldn't let me) but I didn't format either, I just did a reinstall. I would think at worst some of the data might have gotten overwrote when it deleted the windows directory and reinstalled it. The HD was basically nothing but XP + her daughters baby pics. Right now since I can't boot to XP, I'm looking for a solution where I can either boot directly from a CD and recover that way. I don't want to risk possibly overwritting the deleted pics by installing XP again. I'm not sure how the pics got deleted, she said the laptop refused to boot one day and gave it to me. Prior to that it was fine. I know the HD is failing (the bad blocks) but it's not clicking so the pics should be intact somewhere and recoverable without having to send it to a data recovery center.
 
you could try knoppix or a BartPE disk and recover to a Flash drive or the like
 
I have a BartPE disc, and could make a Knoppix but neither have data recovery software included. I googled and found some links but would anyone here care to fill me in on a good *nix based program? I don't use Linux much but am able to function on a CLI perfectly fine if needed.
 
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