One of my hard drives died two days ago probably due to the heat. So I've spent the whole day installing a new HD, XP and some program files. I tried both of my hard drives that were installed before the crash. 1 of them works fine so that's now in the PC with the new HD I bought today. Here's my problem though. The other HD I took out of the PC is now classed as being unformatted! THis can't be true because it was 230GB of photos, music, videos and some other bits and bobs. What's most upsetting is that all of my son's videos since he was born 2 years ago are on there plus my entire music collection I ripped from my CDs over 2 years. Is there anyway to recover any of this data? Windows XP will let me reformat the drive but if I do that I'll lose everything. Please help! Yakumo
First port of call would be to load a linux live disc and see if it can read any content on the disk. Alternatively look for some recovery software but I have no experience with this so someone else might be able to help. Tread very carefully with this drive, it looks like it might be on the brink of total melt down.
I would suggest what Twimfy said. Get a Linux live disc and check if you can read it's contents. I don't know much about recovery software, but i think you can recover all data without much problem. I'm sure someone will help you with that.
If a live Linux disc doesn't see any data, try putting the hard drive in a freezer overnight and then looking at it. If that doesn't work then you might be looking at someone doing data recovery for you ($$$). It's also possible that your old hard drive was formatted NTFS and you somehow formatted the new one as FAT32. I don't see how it would make a difference but I guess it's possible that the FAT32 main drive can't see the NTFS one because of a different filesystem.
Right, if you can't get the files seen from the drive using a linux live disk then your best doing a quick format in windows. formatting won't fully get rid of your files although i don't know exactly what happens to files after a format but as long as you don't use the drive after format say to install xp or store files then you can easily use recovery software to search for and get back your files as it will somehow see your files from a part of your HDD that you don't see in windows.
Yakumo, in the disk management window, does XP show the correct partition but empty or no partition at all?
Quick formatting will flag the data for deletion, so it's effectively "gone" to any operating system until recovery software is used on it. This will make anything he does to get his data back that much harder. Just try a Linux live disc, Yakumo. Burn a Knoppix disc (preferably in the 5 series; anything I've used after this is difficult to use and generally sucks) and see if the drive mounts. If it does, go ahead and get all of your data off of it. I know you said this in your first post, but I just want to reiterate so no one else says it; do not format. If you really have to wind up using recovery software, it shouldn't make a difference either way, but if the drive mounts then you'd just be making things that much harder.
Like everyone sai try a live cd. If that doesn't work get PhotoRec it maybe able to recover the partition table or the individual files. Also I would not stick it inthe freezer unless it's you last hope. If you do and all it was was a partition error you will destoroy your drive.
Thanks for the info guys. I'm going to give a Linux live disc a try. I really need the data from this disc. 2 years worth of CD ripping, many home videos, my segagagadomain site (Mind you that's safe since it's all on the servers anyway), Retro Core files for the new show, 100s of photos and so on. Fingers crossed that a Linux live disc can help. Yakumo
The exact same thing happened to a friend of mine. One day windows just said that the disc was unformatted. But when I connected it to my linux machine it had no problem reading the content. Managed to fix it again using Active@ UNDELETE (I think it was) after doing lots of error checks and disc scanning and stuff.
Don't freeze it - it won't help in this case. Besides, you have to do so correctly or you'll cause more damage. I would look at it with Active@ software, personally. If the data is valuable to you, then it is worth a purchase (use the free demo to see if it'll see the data in the first place). Other than that, you're talking about sending it to someone like Ontrack. If you're talking about 230Gb of data, you're looking at a good £1000 to recover. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you have any important data on your computer, ALWAYS BACK UP REGULARLY! If there's something like photos, back it up to CD or DVD as soon as you put it on the computer.
I'm running that Active@ Undelete demo and it's finding files! Best of all they work as well. I can't seem to find what the limit of the dome is. Nothing is mentioned on the site. Well, 10 hours to wait so we'll see how it goes. Yakumo
In the past, it wouldn't allow you to recover, just see the files with the demo. That may well have changed now. The most important thing is to back up TO ANOTHER DRIVE! It will allow you to overwrite the same drive, but it is very risky! You might want to download the diagnostic tools from the hard drive's manufacturer to check the integrity of the drive before continuing to use it.
Were these drives in any kind of RAID? I experienced something similar for a striped RAID setup when the controler died. As to software recovery solutions, the one I've used is called "R-Studio Data Recovery". It's quite a powerfull kit. It even supports virtual partition mounting so you can mount several seperate drives into various "Virtual" drives, setup in various RAID formats, etc. I don't remember, but it might also support mounting ISO's as a HD and other funny stuff like that. Probably one of the best recovery solutions I've used in along time. In my case, when my controler died, I used R-Studio to take two physical drives and link them together into a virtual RAID drive. Then it was able to see the partition information and use it to recover all my data. If there is partition information left on your drive, I suspect it might be able to do the same.
Well, I ended up paying 39 USD for the full version of Active@ Undelete and it's doing an amazing job but many of the files are renamed to File 000003 and so on. Still at least it groups the file formats to make sorting easier. It took 10 hours to do 120gig so now I'm checking the part of the HD that Active@ Undelete says is in bad or poor condition.
It is a worthwhile investment, and IMHO not a large sum of money at all. Glad it is working for you :thumbsup: If it is reporting part of the hard drive as bad, it probably is! What I do when I encounter that is run HDD Regenerator. It can repair errors without destroying the data. http://www.dposoft.net/#b_hddhid It is a bit more expensive, though! A good procedure is as follows: Scan with HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tools Run HDD regenerator Run Active@ Undelete - back up to a different drive Replace drive Remember to enforce a backup policy ;-)
Speaking of cost, does any *nix editions exist that are free which can do the same deal? Perhaps directly from a live CD?
Well, I can recommend Active@ Undelete to anyone who has a dead hardrive problem. For very little money (39USD) you can get back pretty much anything! It even undleted stuff that I had deleted years ago! So far it's recovered everything from the good section of the disc and about 90% of the stuff from the poor/bad disc sections. I'm well impressed. A big thanks to retro for pointing me in the right direction. yakumo
