Spinrite unable to recover hdd?

[zizou]

Hi,

I have a portable USB HDD that is not being recognised by my system via USB.

Hence, I took the 2.5" Seagate HDD from the USB casing and plugged it into a PC motherboards's IDE connector via a converter. Got to Windows XP, and the HDD was not recognised either.

I went into bios and realised that the HDD was being recognised correctly by bios. Thus, I got a spinrite boot CD and booted from there. Did Option 2 (Recovery of data), took around 4 hours to finish the whole HDD and there was not a single Recovered/Unrecovered sector. All there were was inused and not inused sectors, so I presume all sectors in the HDD are not damaged?

Booted up windows again with the PC, this time round the HDD was recognised as a new drive. However, when I double-click the HDD, windows said the HDD was not formatted.

Since spinrite did not recognise any damaged sectors, am I right to guess that the FAT table in the HDD is corrupted?

As the HDD is used for military purposes, I cannot send it out to any data recovery companies. No one in my military is willing to help me recover the data so I am pretty much on my own.

Any kind soul able to advise what I should do next? Any programs to perhaps repair the FAT table? ANY data recoverable is better than nothing for me, even if its in bits and pieces.

Thanks.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

I would advise you write it off and blame it on your IT so you have no fault as far as data protection goes. If your superior needs you to have this info, then have them push for proper data recovery.

Secondly. Spinrite will recover / correct partition tables, boot sectors, what not.

You might try other programs dedicated to partition recovery.
Get Data Back is cheap and i recomend it.

 

[zizou]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

So actually spinrite's option 2 (Emergency Data Recovery) is already more than enough for data recovery?

The rest of the options like surface analysis don't really help in data recovery right?

Perhaps I will try doing spinrite once more.

Thanks.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Not all data recovery programs work 100% of the time.

The question is what caused it?

The USB port on the drive failed causing data loss (i.e. destroying the partition table). This is likely.

It could be the hard drive controller going nutts.

Or even worse.. the hard drive ram(cashe) is bad. This will corrupt data going in and out of the drive, which would explain why Spinrite worked but didn't do anything.

 

[zizou]

Erm,

Actually the HDD was dropped.

And after the dropping, when trying to save some documents, it hung. Hence, my priority being to prevent rebooting and losing my documents, I plugged out the USB HDD when it was midway through saving (and hanging). It worked though, instantly the PC unfroze.

And from then on the HDD had been damaged. I didn't really notice if the HDD was working right after it was dropped though, since it was dropped when it was plugged in and I was still working on the documents.

Only realised something's wrong when I tried to save.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

That might be physical disk damage depending on if the hard drive could detect rapid acceleration.

Could be something else.

 

[zizou]

hmm..
so I guess my only choice is to try spinrite option 2 again?

If it didn't work I guess thats it?

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Well it depends. Like I said, not all programs work for every situation.
There is an inexpensive program called GetDataBack that will recover old partition tables and rebuild the data.

If the disk is damaged, there may not be anything to recover.



Try this too:
Format the drive and run a a diskcheck on it to find physical errors. Other programs will do a better job. If the disk comes back healthy, good news. Run GetDataBack and it will recover the previous partition table and let it recover data.

 

[torque79]

as silly as it might sound, I've used partition magic to recover partitions which I accidentally deleted (but never formatted the drive after). If the partition just needs to be restored maybe you can get lucky and partition magic could do it in a few seconds.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

Possibly, however GetDataBack costs near the same amount and it is designed to scan the drive for rogue data, partition table information, and you can recover individual files where as you might not be able to recover the partition.