hard drive data recovery

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

My dad's hard drive will not boot. It is a vfat32 Seagate that was
running Windows ME. I pulled the drive and made it a slave and tried to
access its files from another XP machine. The machine could see the
drive but reported it as an unformatted drive.

Any recommendations as to how I might recover some of the files off of
this drive? I've Googled and found software packages that are supposed
to help recover data in cases like this. Are these worth trying?
Thanks in advance for your help.

- David Kistner

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

To truly retrieve the data off a failed harddrive usually costs~$1000 from a
professional service.

--
DaveW



"David Kistner" <spamcatcher1@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:Z7rvc.26191$oh7.781@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
> My dad's hard drive will not boot. It is a vfat32 Seagate that was
> running Windows ME. I pulled the drive and made it a slave and tried to
> access its files from another XP machine. The machine could see the
> drive but reported it as an unformatted drive.
>
> Any recommendations as to how I might recover some of the files off of
> this drive? I've Googled and found software packages that are supposed
> to help recover data in cases like this. Are these worth trying?
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> - David Kistner

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

David Kistner wrote:
>
> My dad's hard drive will not boot. It is a vfat32 Seagate that was
> running Windows ME. I pulled the drive and made it a slave and tried to
> access its files from another XP machine. The machine could see the
> drive but reported it as an unformatted drive.
>
> Any recommendations as to how I might recover some of the files off of
> this drive? I've Googled and found software packages that are supposed
> to help recover data in cases like this. Are these worth trying?
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> - David Kistner

David,

If you get stuck you can send me the drive.

Although I'm in the UK, it will still work out *very* substantially
cheaper than your local options.


Odie
--

RetroData
Data Recovery Experts
www.retrodata.co.uk

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

> My dad's hard drive will not boot. It is a vfat32 Seagate that was
> running Windows ME. I pulled the drive and made it a slave and tried to
> access its files from another XP machine. The machine could see the
> drive but reported it as an unformatted drive.
>

It could be that the MBR (master boot record) is messed up, I have seen the
same symptoms once before, I had a disk that came up as unformatted, I used
FDISK to restore the MBR and windows could read the drive again. Needless to
say I copied everything off it quick and replaced it.

More info here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP&NoWebContent=1
or http://tinyurl.com/azqo

http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

Try rewriting the MBR at your own risk, Good luck.

Adam S

 

[Spajky]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 20:08:12 -0500, "Sir Edward Jones-Dome"
<youknow@who.com> wrote:

>You can try Easy Recovery from Ontrack. You can download a trial version
>that wll let you know if it can see recoverable files. If it does, then you
>can shell out about $75 for the lite version or $200 for the full version.
>It recovers files by extension (.txt, .exe, etc). A bit of advice- this is
>most valuable when you are looking for a specific file type. Good luck

also can try PC Inspector (www.pcinspector.de)
shareware (good one) limit: you have to open/close - run it again
between recoverys; no other limits in demo version ...
--
Regards, SPAJKY ®
& visit my site @ http://www.spajky.vze.com
"Tualatin OC-ed / BX-Slot1 / inaudible setup!"
E-mail AntiSpam: remove ##

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

I swear by GetDataBack. The demo version allows you to see what can be
recovered, and then buy it to save the tracks.

It recovers from disks with damaged sectors, reformatted disks, disks that
show up as unformatted for no good reason.

the_gnome


"David Kistner" <spamcatcher1@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:Z7rvc.26191$oh7.781@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
> My dad's hard drive will not boot. It is a vfat32 Seagate that was
> running Windows ME. I pulled the drive and made it a slave and tried to
> access its files from another XP machine. The machine could see the
> drive but reported it as an unformatted drive.
>
> Any recommendations as to how I might recover some of the files off of
> this drive? I've Googled and found software packages that are supposed
> to help recover data in cases like this. Are these worth trying?
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> - David Kistner

 

[S Haran]

If this is from a Windows ME system then you are likely dealing with a very old drive that is possibly failing. And if it is failing you need to be very careful not to stress the drive more than needed. To see what you are dealing with you might check the SMART health status of the drive with a tool like CrystalDiskInfo

I would advise you to take a sector by sector clone image of the drive and then use recovery tools on the image. Linux ddrescue or HDDSuperclone are designed to image failing drives.