Hard drive crash

  • Thread starter Thread starter ijuba
  • Start date Start date
I

ijuba

Hi,

Any ideas on how to retrieve data from a hard drive crash? Kept meaning to
backup, but oh well....too late.

Thanks.
 
If it happened to me and my data was that critical, I'd pay a professional
to do it for me.
 
It's amazing how many people don't back up their data....

It's not IF the hard drive will crash, it's WHEN.
 
ijuba said:
Hi,

Any ideas on how to retrieve data from a hard drive crash? Kept meaning
to backup, but oh well....too late.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Standard data recovery information:

*IMPORTANT* - If there is any question that the drive is at fault - it's
making noises for instance - and the data is crucial DO NOTHING FURTHER
ON THE DRIVE. Every time you spin that drive up you may be destroying
data. If this is the case, send the drive to a professional data
recovery company like Drive Savers (my preference) or Seagate Data
Recovery. General prices run from $500USD on up. Drive Savers recovered
all the data on a failed laptop drive for one of my clients and it cost
$2,700. He thought it was worth the money; only you know what your data
is worth. I understand that some insurance companies are now covering
data recovery charges under "Loss of Intellectual Property" so check
with yours.

Drive Savers - http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services - https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/

*IMPORTANT* - If you think the drive is physically healthy, it may be
possible to retrieve the data by software methods. DO NOTHING FURTHER ON
THE DRIVE. The data is still on the hard drive but if you overwrite it,
it will be extremely difficult or impossible to recover it. If you use
data recovery software, install it on another machine and either use it
from that operating system or create a bootable cd/floppy and work with
that. If you don't have the skill and/or equipment to do these
procedures and the data is crucial, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop that has experience in doing data recovery. This
will not be your local version of BigStoreUSA. In-shop data recovery is
usually not exactly cheap (for ex., my charges are generally
$150-350USD), but it normally costs less than sending the drive to a
company like Drive Savers. You need to make the determination of the
value of your data and decide what to do.

So, here are some things to try to recover your data:

1. Pull the drive and slave it in a computer running a working install
of XP. Depending on the target drive's characteristics, you may need a
drive adapter; i.e., laptop-to-IDE or a SATA controller card, etc. A
usb/firewire external drive enclosure works very well, too. Use the
working Windows Explorer to copy the data to the rescue system's hard
drive and then burn the data to cd or dvd.

2. Often XP will not boot with a slaved drive that has a damaged file
system. In that case, boot the target computer with either a Bart's PE
or a Linux live cd such as Knoppix and retrieve the data that way.

http://www.knoppix.net
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ - Bart's PE Builder

3. If a Bart's PE or Knoppix won't work, you can try using data recovery
software. Here are some links to various programs. I use Easy Recovery
Pro, but it is expensive. People whom I respect have recommended
R-Studio and Restoration. YMMV.

http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html
PCInspector File Recovery -
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/welcome.htm
Executive Software “Undelete” -
http://www.execsoft.com/undelete/undelete.asp
R-Studio - http://www.r-tt.com/
File Scavenger - http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
Ontrack's EasyRecovery - http://www.ontrack.com/software/


Malke
 
Hi,

Any ideas on how to retrieve data from a hard drive crash? Kept meaning to
backup, but oh well....too late.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Actually I did that a year or so ago. The procedure:

1) buy a new disk and install as master; move existing drive to slave.

2) either install a Linux on the new drive or boot a Linux Live CD.

3) using "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/nameoffiletosaveto conv=noerror conv=sync"
copy the contents of your partition to a file on the new disk.

4) loop mount the copied partition image and recover data.

I sucessfully recovered the entire contents of two partitions after the
disk went bad - no lost data.
 
ijuba said:
Hi,

Any ideas on how to retrieve data from a hard drive crash? Kept meaning to
backup, but oh well....too late.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

If the drive is detected ok to the bios...
just slave it to another system (win2k, XP or Vista) and you may be able to
copy data off it...
or use a 3rd party data recovery utility.

If the drive is no longer detected by the bios...then you may need a data
recovery compmany to do it...
but it will be very expensive
 
Hi,

Any ideas on how to retrieve data from a hard drive crash? Kept meaning to
backup, but oh well....too late.

Thanks.
Click to expand...


If you can still hear (even feel) the drive still spinning, chances
are pretty good your data or most of it is recoverable. With use, hard
drives being a mechanical device can drift out of alignment. The
culprit is the read/write head that sits just a tiny fraction of a
inch over the drive's platters. With the very close tolerances in
today's high capacity drives it can happen more frequently.

All hard drives are arranged in sectors. This is a virtual boundry,
not physcial. Much software is out there that can read any hard drive
sector by sector and thus recover your data byte by byte and rebuild
the file table structure if that is damaged. It can be expensive and
for sure time consuming. At the high end are several forensic software
products that law enforcement agencies use with ENCASE (for evidence
case) being by far the most popular. This will show anything that has
ever been on any hard drive, even if you deleted it, even if your
wiped your hard drive a modest number of times. I think now they
restrict sale to LEA, besides its expensive over 1K. Other products
take a different approach and test your drive sector by sector,
realign the drive's read/write heads if necessary then write your data
back avoiding bad sectors. One such product I've tried with good
success many years back is called SpinRite. I don't know if it
currently supports Vista. It should since it can read NTFS volumes.

Learn more here:

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
 
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