Data Recovery from crashed hard disk

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varun7pathak

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Jan 10, 2013
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I was using a seagate baracuda 500 gb 3.5, 7200 rpm hdd which crashed recently.
I want to recover data from it. The same is detected in my bios but it doesn't show up when i boot my system in windows or linux.
I removed the hdd and placed it in a external casing, the same gets detected again. However I am unable to unable to access any items as its keeps asking me for formatting the same. I have tried a few recovery softwares and below are the results.
1)Easy recovery scans the entire disk in about 8 hours and is unable to recover anything.
2)Steller phoenix and Power data recovery are showing a scan time of around 350 hours. As the disk is connected through external casing which has a usb2 interface the access speed is pretty low. I havent tried the entire process yet.

My question is: is there a software that can be used to reliably recover data but takes lesser time ? or is there a way i can connect the disk in my system and it gets detected ?

are scan times of 350 hours normal ?

 
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Saga Lout

Saga Lout

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Mar 31, 2010
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I use a utility called Recuva and it comes from the CCleaner people at http://www.piriform.com. When it was back in its own box, could you see it in Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management?

You might find, as I often have, that formatting the disk and giving it a drive letter will give you a better chance of recovery. It sounds counter-intuitive but it does work so long as you only select the "Quick Format" option.
 
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varun7pathak

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Jan 10, 2013
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Thanks Saga Lout,
ill give Recuva a try.
I couldnt find the disk in device manager or intel rapid storage management interface. Will check for disk management too.
Also would doing a quick formatting make it accessible ? would the disk be usable again ? if i try accessing the disk through external casing I get CRC error.
 
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Saga Lout

Saga Lout

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It has to be worth trying Checkdisk before doing anything else so connect the disk (no enclosure) then open a command prompt and type
chkdsk X: /r
(where X is the drive letter assigned to it) and let the five stage process run its course. It may take some time but at the end., take note of the number of bad sectors or clusters of sectors the system found and set aside so not data could land on them again. It may be taht the disk has a future life as a back up or storage disk but can't manage to spin at 7,200 r.p.m. every minute the system is running.

The Checkdisk process may make the files more accessible - you may not even need recovery software.
 
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varun7pathak

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Jan 10, 2013
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I just checked, it is not showing in disk management. On doing chkdsk its gives the following error message
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
any pointers ?
 
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Saga Lout

Saga Lout

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RAW is bad news because it runs contrary to Windows native file system, NTFS. I have recovered data from a RAW disk out of a Mac before but only after a quick format in NTFS as part of the disk initialisation process in Disk Management, and then by running Recuva.
 
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S Haran

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Best practice for data recovery is to perform no operation that writes to the drive. So do not format. Do not run chkdsk etc.

Seagate has a free app you can dowload called Seatools. It is diagnostoc software. Run it to determine the state of the drive.

What you should do is attempt to take a clone image of the drive and then try to recover data from the image. The ddrescue command from a Linux boot CD is a good choice for taking an image.

Of course anything you do may make things worse so if this is high value data send it to a data recovery lab.
 
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