Hard Drive Failure

  • Thread starter Thread starter jarrod.walton
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jarrod.walton

I have been working on a PC where the hard drive has failed. I've
already informed the user of the very real possibility that all his
data could be lost, but I was wondering if anyone could point me in the
direction of any tools that I may be able to use to try to pull any
data at all from the disk. It looks to me that the file table has been
blown away, and most of the indexes have been lost. I have tried to
pull data by making the disk a slave and that has been unsuccessful.
So, at this point, I'm open to any suggestions or advice other than it
should've been backed up. :) Thanks in advance.
 
There are professional data recovery firms that can extract data from a
drive in that shape, but they're not cheap. Your customer will be eating
sandwiches for a long time.
 
I have been working on a PC where the hard drive has failed. I've
already informed the user of the very real possibility that all his
data could be lost, but I was wondering if anyone could point me in
the direction of any tools that I may be able to use to try to pull
any
data at all from the disk. It looks to me that the file table has
been
blown away, and most of the indexes have been lost. I have tried to
pull data by making the disk a slave and that has been unsuccessful.
So, at this point, I'm open to any suggestions or advice other than it
should've been backed up. :) Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

You cannot use software tools to pull data from the disk when the disk
has physically failed. First, you need to determine for sure that the
drive is bad by running a diagnostic downloaded from the drive mftr.'s
website. You will create a bootable cd/floppy with the file you
download. Boot with the media you made and do a thorough test. If the
drive fails any physical tests, your customer will need to 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 your client can determine what his data is worth. I
understand that some insurance companies are now covering data recovery
charges under "Loss of Intellectual Property" so the client should
check with his insurance agent.

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

*IMPORTANT* - If the diagnostic shows that the drive is physically
faulty and the client's data is crucial DO NOTHING FURTHER ON THE
DRIVE. Every time you spin that drive up you may be destroying data.

If the drive is physically all right, then you may be able to get the
data by rebuilding the partition table. I believe that Terabyte has a
utility for rebuilding partitions. There is also an old Partition Magic
utility called ptedit, and IIRC Acronis Disk Director also has the
ability to edit partitions.

Editing partitions takes a *lot* of skill and knowledge. If you do it
wrong, you'll completely hose any chance of recovering the client's
data. If you don't have the skill, be honest and either tell the client
to take the drive elsewhere locally or contact Drive Savers. If the
data is important, my recommendation would be to contact Drive Savers
and let them get the data off.

Good luck,

Malke
 
(e-mail address removed) wrote in @h54g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
I have been working on a PC where the hard drive has failed. I've
already informed the user of the very real possibility that all his
data could be lost, but I was wondering if anyone could point me in the
direction of any tools that I may be able to use to try to pull any
data at all from the disk. It looks to me that the file table has been
blown away, and most of the indexes have been lost. I have tried to
pull data by making the disk a slave and that has been unsuccessful.
So, at this point, I'm open to any suggestions or advice other than it
should've been backed up. :) Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

As Malke said, if it's physically damaged, it's best to not do anything
with it and send it somewhere, if the client wants to pay for it.

If it is not physically damaged, you MAY be able to retreive data. Of
course, running the extended diagnostic utility may damage it more also.

I had good luck with a program called ByteBack. You boot from a floppy to
DOS, then run ByteBack. It locks the drive first, so nothing can be written
to it. They do have an evaluation version, that doesn't recover, but at
least it will tell you what it thinks it can recover from the drive.

http://toolsthatwork.com/byteback.htm

Looks like it costs around $500 if you wanted to buy it.
 
I have been working on a PC where the hard drive has failed. I've
already informed the user of the very real possibility that all his
data could be lost, but I was wondering if anyone could point me in the
direction of any tools that I may be able to use to try to pull any
data at all from the disk. It looks to me that the file table has been
blown away, and most of the indexes have been lost. I have tried to
pull data by making the disk a slave and that has been unsuccessful.
So, at this point, I'm open to any suggestions or advice other than it
should've been backed up. :) Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...


How dead is dead? That is, what failed?

If it's the controller card, you can find another, from the EXACT model
drive and controller card revision, and replace it. Delicate, but
doable. This is one you may want to leave to a professional data
recovery company if you're at all uncomfortable with it.

If it's bad sectors, clone the drive, and do chkdsk /r on the copy to
cure your file system difficulties.

One thing I've actually had work, was boot to the recovery console,
chkdsk /r until it got hung up trying to fix the damage around halfway
through, and then canceled the operation. I was then able to access
the drive as a secondary master (disconnected the cd) and recover all
but 1 or 2 documents.

If you got 1000 bad sectors in an a 80gb drive, that's a tiny fraction
of a percentage point lost. And chances are good you won't lose too
many data files. the Programs and OS can of course be reinstalled.

If it's a mechanical difficulty, it's professional data recovery time.
 
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