Lost photos on PC hard drive

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Desiree1978

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Jun 14, 2012
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Hello,
I have a monumental problem. My PC had a hard drive failure. It refused to boot up again. so my husband tried using ubuntu to see if we could recover the photos on the computer. that loaded on fine (as a second operating system) and we could see everything but the c drive. which of course is where everything is stored.
in the end we decided to cut our losses and re format the disk and learn from our mistake and back everything up in future. the disk wouldn't re format properly and the c drive is still missing but with all the data still on it as that part of the drive wouldn't format.
i've been trying several recovery programs but nothing will see past the partition to the unformulated section of the disk.
Is there a software out there that can help with this problem or is it time for the professional data recovery?
 
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Desiree1978

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Jun 14, 2012
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unfortunately i'm not very tech when it comes to computers. I can say however that the drive in question C is no longer to be found and we can't seem to access it at all. we know that that section is not in use, it couldn't be formatted and we are guessing that all that data is still there we just need to find out how to access it. If that is even possible.
 
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Boomer83

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Jun 13, 2012
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Well unfortunately if the HDD is corrupted, you can't really recover the data yourselves. If Windows can't access it, a data recovery program most likely can't either. Programs like Undelete are for recovering files that were deleted, or formatted off the disc, not corrupted. If you really want the files back, you'll probably need to bring it to a data recovery firm. Unfortunately, depending on the size of the drive and the reason it's broken, it can be insanely expensive.

If you want to keep trying, you can, you wont mess anything up as long as you don't keep writing to the disk. Don't reformat it again; you can recover data after 1 reformat without issue, and probably even 2, but it starts losing integrity after that.

Now you said that 'part of the drive wouldn't reformat'? What do you mean by that? Is it partitioned? Can you actually access part of the drive, or did you just mean that it got to a certain percentage while formatting and stopped, and the entire drive is inaccessible?
 
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Desiree1978

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Jun 14, 2012
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The drive was 40GB and partitioned in 3 parts, 20GB / 16GB / 4GB, the 20GB was the first main partition where windows XP used to boot from before it failed. I tried using the recovery disk but did not get anywhere. I downloaded a CD bootable version of Ubuntu but this could not see the first partition either, and didn't have the experience to really use this as a tool to help.

I then tried to do a reload of XP onto the 20GB, which involved trying to reformat this part of the disk. This failled about 10% to 20% of the way through and told me that the hard disk itself had the problem on the second attempt, ie not a straight data issue.

As this had failed i gave loading XP onto the 16GP partition a go, this loaded on first time, and it is bootable and usable from here.

The utilities i have tried so far cannot see the 20GB partion as it is not formatted and is not seen as a volume by windows or presumable the MBR.
 
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Boomer83

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Jun 13, 2012
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Have you gone into the Computer Management utility to see if the partition is at least recognized by windows?

Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage

From there you should be able to look at all of the drives in your system. If you can see the bad partition within the drive, that's a good sign. If you have to, you can perform a quick format (by right clicking the partition I believe) which may allow you to recover the files. It might also just fail again though, and remember, every time you format, you lower the chance of recovering the files. But, a quick format should be less damaging than a full format, it basically just tells the computer the drive can be written over, rather the actually setting everything back to 0s.

You're safest bet would still be to try to get the data recovered. You might want to get a quote on a recovery service before you do this, just to see if it's worth it.

Here are some of the companies Western Digital allows you to use when under their warranty. It doesn't just have to be a WD HDD, this is just a good list of trusted options.
 
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Boomer83

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Jun 13, 2012
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Glad I could help! Also, I'd probably replace that drive if I were you. Even if it works now, it could just break down again.

And remember, backup, backup, backup. I learned this lesson the hard way about 3 days ago. Permanently lost about 2TB of stuff. Nothing too important or irreplaceable like personal photos, but still pretty upsetting.
 
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Clamoon

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Nov 20, 2012
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When you delete pictures (or any files) from a memory card or USB memory device the data itself isn't deleted, just the file system pointers that says where the data for those files is located. The area where the deleted picture data was stored is also now marked as free space so it is available to the system for any new files to be written there instead.
 
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