Data Recovery

[Capt Gabriela Fullpepper]

Just wondering if anyone has had to do any data recovery on a corrupted hard drive.

I rebuilt my system this weekend and when I put on my backup drive into the new system, it corrupted the drive. All it shows is that it has a logical drive on it, but that it needs formating. Now in no way am I planning on formating the drive as then data recovery then gets a heck of a lot harder. Normally I would not mid but this backup drive has all my photography on it. While I have my portfolio on a CD and many of my photos on my web site, there are many I do not. As I said this was my backup drive. My normal drive toasted and withthe new hard drive in and the OS installed I cannot read it. I have tried it as a USB drive on four systems (all same results and as a slave to another old OS drive I had.

Anyone have any particular luck with data recovery software. I cannot afford sending it out as most places start at around $300 on up and I really cannot afford that.

Being a PC tech I tried many things with no luck. If you can suggest something else or a great piece of software to use, let me know please as I do not want to lose those photos. Everything else can go, but my photos are most important.

HUM time to purchase yet another backup drive to backup my backup.

[Stalkwell]

I have had good luck with the products from http://www.runtime.org/ ... GetBack is what I have used to recover a couple 1TB drives.  Most of the time the FAT is clobbered, and sometimes MBR is gone too.  Are your drives Seagate 500/750/1TBs?  They are having issues.  My failures were not drive h/w related, but corruptions between XP and the drive's FAT, induced by f/w bugs on the drives.

I have two mirrors done a week apart and placed in separate locations, and also have older archives on top of that... I'm over 1TB on my active data base.  My paranoia has paid off a few times so far.

Good luck, and remember..
Back up and Back up again 

Stalkwell

[Capt Gabriela Fullpepper]

They are indeed seagate drives that are about 5 years old (120TB) The drive I have data on was Not Fat but NTFS and was corrupted not failed. The main drive failed and when I installed a new drive and OS the backup drive came back as RAW. I have managed to get a software package called Easeus Data Recovery and it seems to find many of my photos. Of all the files the photos are the only thing I want back.

I sure hope this software does it's job. I tried others but most either didn't do a good job in finding the data or crashed/aborted when it got to the back end of the drive

[dbaldock]

There's an article in the March 2009 issue of Linux Journal magazine titled "When Disaster Strikes: Hard Drive Crashes"

If you're not normally running Linux on your PC, you'd need to use a Linux Live Disk CDROM to boot from.  It makes no changes to your PC's Hard Drives, unless you specifically tell it to install.  So you can boot up and run the rescue/recovery tools without affecting your MS Windows installation.


Take Care,
David Baldock

[Cap'n Hunnar Graybeard]

I've had some luck using Spinrite from Gibson Research http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm