Any hope to recover data?

[aaron_us96]

Hey, I'm hoping somebody here will be able to give me some guidance as I'm running out of ideas...

Background:
Partners computer decided randomly one morning that her system HDD doesn't work anymore. I tried all sorts of bios settings, cable and jumper combinations but the bottom line is that her computer would not recognize the drive even existed, not even at bootup let alone in windows after reinstalling windows onto her backup drive. I placed the damaged drive into my computer and not only did it not show up anywhere but it stopped my backup hdd from displaying in windows (told me it had to be formatted).

I've determined that the only way I can get anything out of the hdd is to place it on an IDE channel all by itself. Luckily my primary hdd is a SATA drive so all I had to do was unplug my backup drive and we were in business, sort of...

So windows now recognize the new piece of hardware and installs drivers for it. The problem now is that the Disk Management utility shows the physical drive (80g WD drive with 2 partitions) as only 7.5g in size. I assume that this space is what was left over from the 2 partitions. I also noted that my computer is VERY slow to boot past the windows loading screen when the damaged drive is attached.

Recover My Files Results:
Not good so far I'm afraid. I download the latest version and have tried to run fast and complete format recovers on the 7.5g physical drives to no avail. The search starts and it all seems OK but it runs incredibly slowly. I left it running overnight and almost 9hours later the search box read something like, "searching drive 0-80 of 16540064". Yes, that says 80 of 16 million. Now after 9 hours my very poor math skills tell me that I would have to wait somewhere around 100 years for that search to finish

Oh and my computer that I'm trying to repair the drive on is WinXP Pro x64 edition. I don't know if this makes any difference but the stupid OS stuffs up so many programs that I never can be sure

So what now? Is there any hope left?

 

[WingDing]

Go to the website of the hard drive's manufacturer, there is usually some good diagnostic software that can evaluate your drive's condition.

 

[monkeymanuk]

It sounds very much like your hard drive has a physical problem, this often leads to very slow reads due to the fact that the drive head is constantly attempting to read data over and over again.


Have you tried chkdsk [driveletter:] /R from the command prompt? Start/Run/cmd

This will attempt to recover data from bad sectors on the hard disk.

If your other machine does not even recognise the disk then you could have a cable problem, but more likely the hard disk controller is failing/failed.

This is a catastrophic failure and results in complete loss of data (unless you send it off to a specialist data recovery company for loadsamoney).

If there is nothing really important on the disk then I would suggest binning it and starting over. These things can take a serious amount of time with no guarantee of success.

Seagate used to have a great online tool, but it appears to have vanished from their site. You could register to download the windows version instead.

Good Luck!

 

[SSS_DDK]

i have no idea what's happening with you, but here's some things i once did when my hard drive died on me.
1- when you (or someone else) bought it, it came with recovery/diagnostic software. If you had the bulk version, then, as previously suggested, visit the website.
2-Boot it under Linux.. For some reason, it always gets where windows can not. BIOS is stupid, it might crash your system just because you have one of the disks with a bad MBR.
3- Attempt raw recovery(only if the files you need are in smlall numbers, coz you'll have to edit the file proereties later by hand....depends on the tool)
4- I once did a MicroChip based IDE drive copier. IT does a raw copy of the disk You can find on the internet, circuit design and an microcontroller program to copy your IDE drive onto another one. It won't cost you much (not more than 30 $). Of course, no guarantee of success, and you'd probably need assistance.

Again, these may seem like out of context solutions...sorry. It's just that i have no idea what your problem might be.

 

[kevin_476]

It sounds like your drive has some serious errors and unfortunately I don’t think a data recovery software solution will be up to the task in your case. You will have to look for a physical data recovery solution. Look for a reliable data recovery company. We have 1000 PCs in our office and we often hire services of Salvage Data Recovery Lab of Stamford. I don’t have their address readily available. I will have to ask our IT Manager. You may search in internet by the name to get further detail from their site. Let me know if you have problem.

 

[lupinesithlord]

Hook it up via enclosure...if it still has issues (it will) run scandisk, it will pick up the enclosure drive and ask to check it as well. I just saved a bunch of data on a 250 gig drive that on hookup to a second system was reporting 0 bytes out of a total 0 bytes used. good luck