- May 12, 2013
- 9
- 0
- 10,510
Hi, Last night I lost my internal Data drive. I was in outlook express and deleting a ton of mail when the system hanged. The PC then switched itself off. It's a Medion PC. I rebooted the PC to find that windows wanted to perform ChkDsk on my H "Data" Drive - it went through 3 tests all passed. On the third test after it passed the system halted at this point for a long time. So I rebooted, again the system wanted to run ChkDsk on my H drive.
On the third attempt I opted to by pass the ChkDsk and eventually the system booted up into Windows XP (Home). When it arrived at the desktop it ran very slow so I checked TaskMgr to see what was happening. I decided to shutdown. I suspected one of the drives was playing up so I disconnected the H drive and booted with just C and its logical extensions (D and E) booted up fine with no hitch except for the obvious certain tasks / progs not running because of missing H drive.
I then rebooted but with H drive attached and again ChkDsk wanted to check H passed all tests, again it halted after the third successful task. I rebooted again and bypassed ChkDsk.
I then checked in disk manager which I had to run from Task Manager. It showed my H Drive Data was 100% free (it should have been around 80 to 90% full) and it had no associated file system (it should have been NTFS) and was a logical drive as extended partition.
My other internal drive (C, D and E were working fine.)
I have AV and firewall. My Os Windows XP Home was patched with the latest from Microsoft.
H drive is detected in BIOS fine.
When I try to run from Safe Mode (from any of the options) it hangs fro a considerable length of time when H drive is attached. When H drive is not attached runs in safe mode fine.
I have not come across this before and would really appreciate any help and advice to resolve. If anyone can point me in the right direction or provide step by step to recovery I would greatly appreciate it. I have read some of the "stickys" above but unsure which advice to follow as unsure as to what is causing the issue (caused the issue!?).
How do I:
(1) Recover the (data) drive so I have all my data intact?
I do have Recovery Console as a boot up option at start-up. I am willing to follow advice and to feedback on my (hopefully) successful conclusion.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my issue and providing a solution.
UPDATE
Having read masses of info. on recovering data from damaged hard drives, I requested further info from grc on one of their products SpinRite and explained my situation and why i was considering SpinRite. They kindly replied back saying that my issue was more likely to be a corrupt windows system files. So, I read up on that issue. Before I started on the repair to the corrupted file system I ran Recuva - recovered the majority of my files but some like PDFs, word docs and jpegs had corrupted due I assume the damaged hard and or the corrupted file system.
Not sure what was the true root cause I decided to run TestDisk and carried out an analysis following their step by step guides online. This gave an error suggesting that my sectors were different and I could see myself, by a count of 1. I mistakenly ran their repair process on the partition before taking a copy of the files or image using TestDisk, although I felt confident having recovered most using Recuva. I then for some reason ran sfc /scannow on the H drive. I then rebooted**.
The system again tried to run chkdsk I bypassed it and again the desktop went very slow. Managed to get to the desktop checked DiskManagement and again it was stating that H drive was 100% free with no file system (NTFS missing) ergo was RAW. I got TestDisk up and running again. I set about carrying out a complete image of the faulty drive via TestDisk under advanced option.
Having realised I might have made a mistake I open TestDisk again and under advanced I took an image of the Hard Drive and copied this to a spare hard drive. I then decided to be extra careful and copied every file using TestDisk under advanced. I started this off and left it running overnight (6 hours). Following day my back up drive arrived. I then looked at the faulty drive to find that all my files and folders had returned and that under DiskManagement I could see my H Drive was present healthy with NTFS file system with around 5% free space. Which compared to my issue at the beginning of this sorry tale was showing 100% free empty and no file system i.e. RAW. I decided to ignore what my eyes were seeing and carried out another full copy via TestDisk to be absolutely sure. This is run under the advanced option and it copies every single file but does not copy them into their file and folder structure, but adds a number to the front of the files actual previous name e.g. XYZname.pdf now as 123456XYZname.pdf , unlike Recuva which recovers files and folder structure as intact as far as it possibly can.
After the reboot** the system was not rebooted again. Something had happened whilst TestDisk was carrying out an image and fully copy of the faulty H drive. So I cannot understand what had occurred. I checked Event Viewer a very useful tool in windows which can provide additional information to any issues occurring on your system. This told me the last reported disk error was at 7.30am this morning saying there was a fault / bad sector on the drive. Now last night and since last Sunday I could not see anything in windows on this drive. Now, since this morning I can see all my drive contents and there were no corruptions?
Can anyone explain what had happened? How did it right itself without a reboot?
On the third attempt I opted to by pass the ChkDsk and eventually the system booted up into Windows XP (Home). When it arrived at the desktop it ran very slow so I checked TaskMgr to see what was happening. I decided to shutdown. I suspected one of the drives was playing up so I disconnected the H drive and booted with just C and its logical extensions (D and E) booted up fine with no hitch except for the obvious certain tasks / progs not running because of missing H drive.
I then rebooted but with H drive attached and again ChkDsk wanted to check H passed all tests, again it halted after the third successful task. I rebooted again and bypassed ChkDsk.
I then checked in disk manager which I had to run from Task Manager. It showed my H Drive Data was 100% free (it should have been around 80 to 90% full) and it had no associated file system (it should have been NTFS) and was a logical drive as extended partition.
My other internal drive (C, D and E were working fine.)
I have AV and firewall. My Os Windows XP Home was patched with the latest from Microsoft.
H drive is detected in BIOS fine.
When I try to run from Safe Mode (from any of the options) it hangs fro a considerable length of time when H drive is attached. When H drive is not attached runs in safe mode fine.
I have not come across this before and would really appreciate any help and advice to resolve. If anyone can point me in the right direction or provide step by step to recovery I would greatly appreciate it. I have read some of the "stickys" above but unsure which advice to follow as unsure as to what is causing the issue (caused the issue!?).
How do I:
(1) Recover the (data) drive so I have all my data intact?
I do have Recovery Console as a boot up option at start-up. I am willing to follow advice and to feedback on my (hopefully) successful conclusion.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my issue and providing a solution.
UPDATE
Having read masses of info. on recovering data from damaged hard drives, I requested further info from grc on one of their products SpinRite and explained my situation and why i was considering SpinRite. They kindly replied back saying that my issue was more likely to be a corrupt windows system files. So, I read up on that issue. Before I started on the repair to the corrupted file system I ran Recuva - recovered the majority of my files but some like PDFs, word docs and jpegs had corrupted due I assume the damaged hard and or the corrupted file system.
Not sure what was the true root cause I decided to run TestDisk and carried out an analysis following their step by step guides online. This gave an error suggesting that my sectors were different and I could see myself, by a count of 1. I mistakenly ran their repair process on the partition before taking a copy of the files or image using TestDisk, although I felt confident having recovered most using Recuva. I then for some reason ran sfc /scannow on the H drive. I then rebooted**.
The system again tried to run chkdsk I bypassed it and again the desktop went very slow. Managed to get to the desktop checked DiskManagement and again it was stating that H drive was 100% free with no file system (NTFS missing) ergo was RAW. I got TestDisk up and running again. I set about carrying out a complete image of the faulty drive via TestDisk under advanced option.
Having realised I might have made a mistake I open TestDisk again and under advanced I took an image of the Hard Drive and copied this to a spare hard drive. I then decided to be extra careful and copied every file using TestDisk under advanced. I started this off and left it running overnight (6 hours). Following day my back up drive arrived. I then looked at the faulty drive to find that all my files and folders had returned and that under DiskManagement I could see my H Drive was present healthy with NTFS file system with around 5% free space. Which compared to my issue at the beginning of this sorry tale was showing 100% free empty and no file system i.e. RAW. I decided to ignore what my eyes were seeing and carried out another full copy via TestDisk to be absolutely sure. This is run under the advanced option and it copies every single file but does not copy them into their file and folder structure, but adds a number to the front of the files actual previous name e.g. XYZname.pdf now as 123456XYZname.pdf , unlike Recuva which recovers files and folder structure as intact as far as it possibly can.
After the reboot** the system was not rebooted again. Something had happened whilst TestDisk was carrying out an image and fully copy of the faulty H drive. So I cannot understand what had occurred. I checked Event Viewer a very useful tool in windows which can provide additional information to any issues occurring on your system. This told me the last reported disk error was at 7.30am this morning saying there was a fault / bad sector on the drive. Now last night and since last Sunday I could not see anything in windows on this drive. Now, since this morning I can see all my drive contents and there were no corruptions?
Can anyone explain what had happened? How did it right itself without a reboot?
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