Urgent Help! Data Recovery and Scared to Death.

D

Drakul

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
374
Hi guys,

I know it's not exactly an OS question but i'm freaked out and need help.

As some of you may know I installed Vista HP and my HDD where I had backed up all my files was formated as dynamic (YES i know! let's drop this right now) so i couldn't/can't access it.

So anyway I was afraid to use the dskprobe thing straight away for fear it would mess things up (I have a lot of important docs on this drive like wedding files and such :/)
So I got Recover My Files and ran the fast recovery thing (which is supposed to take 20 minutes but on my drive took 4 hours)
with this I was able to save my first partition on the drive which had my game saves but the others wouldn't show.

So I ran the complete file recovery which took a mighty 80 Hours! (which the support people told me was way too long and not normal....)

anyway i ran it and at the end all my files seemed to be there and I started saving them on my drive but they are all corrupted!
I tried doc, txt, mp3, pdf..........nothing works!

The HDD is 1 week old! and was working perfectly before I installed my new rig and Vista.

I'm really starting to get scared I won't be able to save ANYthing......

I'm thinking about buying a rack to make the HDD external and try to read it on a bunch of computers that have XP.

or scrap Vista and reinstall XP, or make a dual boot with XP to see if I can still get the files.


do you guys have any suggestions?
 
Pug the HD into another working system and pull the fiels over for temporary storage.
 
Here is my advice, so take it or leave it:

If the data on that drive is absolutely 100% irreplaceable, you need to take that drive out of any machine that it's currently attached to, wrap it in a towel, put it in a box or chest or someplace else that's safe, and leave it alone.

And I'm dead serious.

Right now, you're on the verge of freaking out totally about it, and once that happens, you're going to end up doing something you'll regret, I promise you. You need to put that drive in a safe place, away from your normal computer environment, away from stray magnetic fields (hey, I cover all the bases), and away from snooping or prying eyes, and then you need to take a break from computers for a minimum of 36 hours.

Again, I'm dead serious.

Once that's done, once the drive is safe, and once you do get your machine up and running again with whatever new drive you have, whatever new OS you've finally decided upon, then and only then should you start considering your next course of action.

I've been working with, on, and around computers pretty much every day I've been alive since 1974, and when I say I've really seen it all, believe me, I've seen it all, including customers on the verge of freaking out and doing things they immediately and forever more regretted because they simply couldn't be objective about the situation that was staring them in the face.

Put the drive in a safe place (the towel thing is optional but can't hurt, and if you have the electrostatic bag the drive originally came in or a spare one, put it inside that and then inside the towel), take a break from computers for 36 hours or more - your choice but do it - and then you can come back to this with a clear head and proceed with proper data recovery as required.

I'm not going to get into all the various ways to recover data at this point because it would literally be me throwing jet fuel on an open flame, so forget it. :)

Take a break, stash the drive, spend some time with the family/friends, take in a movie, go for a swim, etc... do some real-life stuff for a period of time, relax, and when you come back then you'll be a weeeeeee bit more objective.

Panic will cause you to completely fuck this whole situation up in spades... that's not what you want to happen right now. Take a break, we'll be here when you get back.
 
Joe Average said:
Panic will cause you to completely fuck this whole situation up in spades... that's not what you want to happen right now. Take a break, we'll be here when you get back.
Click to expand...

Probably not the advice you want right now, but he's right. Almost every single catastrophe that I have personally experienced involved an increased heart rate and feelings of panic. Don't freak out, walk away, take some time off and let your head clear out a bit.

Don't fuck around with it right now, you'll only make things worse, I've done it more times than I can remember, and it's really not worth it.

And you know we'll still be here in a few days, and you'll be able to approach this with a clear head.....

Now, go have a beer and calm down:)

 
well you guys have a very valid point.
But just so we're clear, I'm not about to freak out and try out a crazy hacked up program or kick my computer.
I'm just very scared to lose it all (and pissed at MS but that's another story).

and you're right I've seen some crazy things happen in my time too.
when i lived in Paris near to the Radio House and Eiffel Tower I would get some crazy problems with my computer......one of my firends once joked that it might be radio wave and we joked about it for a little but after a while it seemed more and more likely.

then I move to NYC and never had an issue ever again. :)


anyway yeah I'm pretty calm I'm just trying to weight out my options from here. And the only ones I can think of right now the easiest one is probably taking the HDD out and buying a rack to try it out in other computers.
 
Buying a USB enclosure so you can access the drive is a good idea, no need for a 'rack' (if I understand what you're talking about, a removable drive tray/etc). That would allow you hopeful access to the drive when you're ready to start this data recovery operation.

Go to http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk and read everything you can about that software, the user guide/manual/whatever, as that would probably be the software I'd recommend since it's free and highly recommended by many people I know. Obviously, data recovery is a tricky situation, so at no time will you ever write any data to that drive in question as that could really pooch things up even worse.

I don't think there's anything specifically wrong with that drive aside from it being a Dynamic one, that's another thread entirely however. The data should still be readable, so that's a plus as I don't have any reason to suspect this is a hardware issue, corruption, or anything of that nature.

Your primary task now is data recovery - reading it so it can be copied to another drive that's known to work and is functional at the time of recovery and not data repair meaning trying to make that drive functional again. I hope that makes sense as so many people get it mixed up. Data repair would entail trying to get that partition back to Basic status, using that drive again, etc. That's not what you need to do: you need to get your data off of it as completely as possible to a safe location; once that's accomplished then you can hose that drive totally and start clean from scratch - but again, only when your data is safe.

But it's Saturday, go take a day off, come back to it tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night, no worries. As long as the drive is safe, the data is too.
 
I totally understand what you are saying.
and data recovery is precisely what I'm trying to do.
I don't have any reason to suspect the drive is faulty either, i mean it's brand new and the only thing I did to it was partition, format and copy data to it. that's it.

as far as taking a day off I just came back from pilates class and i'm about to go die on my bed from exhaustion :)

I'm going to check out that website you mentioned.
are there any USB enclosure (you're right that's what i meant, not rack) you'd recommend or are they all pretty much similar?

thanks a lot for the help btw.
 
A USB enclosure is a USB enclosure, they all do the same damned things. Just make sure the one you get has the drive interface to match what you have (ATA for ATA drives, SATA for SATA, that sort of thing). You don't need fancy cooling fans, all that extra mumbojumbo crap, just a basic barebones external USB drive housing is all you need.

Circuit City sells 'em, Best Buy, Radio Shack probably has some in stores, etc. If you've got a Fry's in your area, that'll probably be the cheapest price. Vantec makes some that I've owned in the past, never had issues with 'em, but I'm not going to try and offer specific brand names as recommendations because there's so many of 'em out there.

Just get an external USB hard drive enclosure matching the drive interface you have and you're set.
 
ez recovery pro is a safe way to retrieve data from a fucked up drive. Its the best software I've ever used for data recovery, and its saved me several times. Its fucking expensive though.
 
I use EasyRecovery myself, as well as R-Studio and several others (have been for years now, all part of the toolkit I've created throughout my career), but I rarely mention them because of cost issues. TestDisk does a great job for being truly free software, it really does. I've done my own comparisons and noted it recovered data 100% equal to EasyRecovery and R-Studio in the past, hence my recommendation.

Sure, the commercial products offer a lot more in terms of bells and whistles and additional functionality, but in this instance I believe TestDisk will work just dandy for the OP's situation.
 
Ok I'll look into it.

I checked out testdisk it looks cool if a little unfriendly.
It's a pure repair/recovery program right? it can't do anything for turning a dynamic drive into basic it seems.
I might try this out after I try out the enclosure option.
 
Drakul said:
Ok I'll look into it.

I checked out testdisk it looks cool if a little unfriendly.
It's a pure repair/recovery program right? it can't do anything for turning a dynamic drive into basic it seems.
I might try this out after I try out the enclosure option.
Click to expand...

Hence my earlier statement this task you're looking at is data recovery only - you do not want to risk losing all that data in a split second by trying some conversion from Dynamic to Basic that will more than likely fail and take everything with it in the process. Data recovery is the task at hand, not conversion... focus on that and you'll be fine.

There are no 100% reliable methods or tools out there that will convert a Dynamic Drive/Disk back to Basic, not 1, and believe me, ever since Microsoft introduced Dynamic Drive/Disk capabilities I've been looking for such a thing, as have many thousands of other techs worldwide and such a thing simply doesn't exist.

Honestly, even now years later since the concept of Dynamic Drives/Disks first appeared, I still don't know why they came out with it. I've never encountered a business using them, never found a client using them, and when I do hear the horror stories about people that made the conversion, all I can do is frown about it and know instantly that it'll come back to bite them square in the ass sooner or later.

Bleh... focus on data recovery first and foremost, not conversion. Get the enclosure, put the drive in it, boot the PC, plug in the drive, make sure Windows can "see" it, then use TestDisk to do data recovery...
 
yeah yeah that's what I'm focusing on don't worry :)
I was just thinking ahead for when I've saved my important files.

oh and no I haven't tried my disk on any other computer yet.
 
Can you view the drive in disk management? Here's my thread with somewhat of a similar problem (dynamic partitions).

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1312931

All I had to do was import the drive and I had full access again. I read about the solution in a KB article which said something about the ability to import such drives only on Vista Business or Ultimate. Not sure if this is true but give it a shot.

Oh yea make sure all you're trying to do is import it and not trying to convert from dynamic to static because that would involve a reformat of the drive.
 
I remember seeing it int he drive management but right now it's out of my PC so I can't try that.

I just bought a HDD Enclosure at Circuit City for fairly cheap.
I tried to plug it into my macbook pro and it said "the disk you inserted was not readable but this computer"

Also I just tried plugging it into an older laptop with XP Home on it.
here's what happened.

hdd1ip7.jpg

as you can see what is supposed to be 3 partitions is now just one and the size is way off!

hdd2ig0.jpg

here you can see that even though the Drive size seemed to have 350MB, each folder is 0bytes empty.
and also none of the folder correspond to what's on the drive.

any ideas?
 
Looks like bad news from what I see in your images.

You could try a free recovery tool first like the one Joe mentioned.

As others have mentioned Easy Recovery Pro is a very good data recovery program, one of the best, but it costs a fair amount of money. BUT, if your data is that important then it's worth it. Just keep in mind nothing is guaranteed...you may spend a load of money and still get nothing back. I've had luck with GetDataBack also, it's cheaper, but I still prefer the big guns like Easy Recovery Pro. Then again..and not to be a dick.. if your data was that important then backing it up onto a separate physical drive(preferably a external drive)on a regular basis would have been a great choice. I image to a external drive weekly and then copy that image to another external drive, backup of a backup. Something goes seriously down the shitter I just reimage, ten minutes later i'm back in business. Or I open Ghost Explorer and pull out just the files I need.

About dynamic disks, they aren't the way to go...again as others have mentioned. Outside of Windows software RAID which is absolutely useless IMO, I really see no practical purpose for them.

In the end if you're not confident with data recovery you may want to call up a reputable shop(not Best Buy, Circuit City or any of those shit houses) and see what they charge. Ask them what data recovery program they use.
 
I used EasyRecovery Advanced Recovery.
I was able able to save most of my pics but a bunch are corrupted or cropped with the rest of the pic being dark grey.

But I didn't get nearly everything.
all my Avi, mp4 .... files didn't show and it seems all the files are fairly small.
In the avi it recovered they were most about 15MB which makes no sense.

In most EasyRecovery options my HDD doesn't even pop up.
It does in Advanced Recovery but show as 1 single partition and doesn't recognize the format.

also when I run the DriveTest and SMARTTest it says the disk has no problem.
In the PartitionTest however it doesn't even show.
 
Hi guys, it's been a little while.

I've been having some success with Recover My Files so i recommend the program (much cheaper than EasyRecovery too)


I just lauched a XP Pro Live CD and my HDD is accesible in all its wonder. I'm pumped.
 
You can try a couple of tools...
Knoppix - great tool for getting data - this is a linux live cd that can read NTFS partitions! it also has on the fly usb support so get out your usb dirve and plug it in, now drop a knoppix cd into your drive and boot up the computer with the drive attached and no other drives for simplicty, on the desktop will be icons for all of your partitions, click on them and figure out where your files lay, now plug in your usb drive and drag and drop and be done with it!
 
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