Recommended software to recover data from faulty hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frederic W. Erk
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Frederic W. Erk

I would be interested to find a software solution to the problem of
recovering data from a faulty hard disk. It would be very good if the
software could analyse the driver and to some degree prevent the drive from
crashing. The only software reference I have is OnTrack suite. Any advice
would be most welcome.

- Frederic W. Erk, EIHSD.
 
Frederic W. Erk said:
I would be interested to find a software solution to the problem of
recovering data from a faulty hard disk. It would be very good if the
software could analyse the driver and to some degree prevent the drive from
crashing. The only software reference I have is OnTrack suite. Any advice
would be most welcome.

- Frederic W. Erk, EIHSD.
Click to expand...
hop over to grc.com and buy spinrite
regards
ted
 
Thank you, Ted, for the interesting advice and link. It is much less
expensive than Ontrack recovery suite, and I like the spirit of the GRC
group.

- Frederic W. Erk, EIHSD.
 
Thank you, Ted, for the interesting advice and link. It is much less
expensive than Ontrack recovery suite, and I like the spirit of the GRC
group.
Click to expand...

How to recover your data depends on what kind of failure you have, and
it's possible most or all of it is not recoverable. DIY software can
only do so much.

before spending money, I'd mount the disk into a second machine with
the same or later OS as the secondary drive and see if you can see
your data. If you can, copy it off and you're done. You can also
download and burn a bootable Linux that runs in memory and can see
FATxx and NTFS file system. If it sees your data you can get it off,
but the details depend on.

Ontrack is a very old and reputable recovery service.
 
In fact, several of my colleagues complained about data loss. I examined
their disks on my PC. These were IBM Deskstar hard disk drives, in fact
Hitachi 60 GXP ones, according to IBM technical support. I downloaded and
used Hitachi disk recovery utility. It repaired the disk errors, but the
data was erased, too. Hence I wondered: what would I do to prevent this from
happening to me?

- Frederic W. Erk, EIHSD.
 
Frederic said:
In fact, several of my colleagues complained about data loss. I examined
their disks on my PC. These were IBM Deskstar hard disk drives, in fact
Hitachi 60 GXP ones, according to IBM technical support. I downloaded and
used Hitachi disk recovery utility. It repaired the disk errors, but the
data was erased, too. Hence I wondered: what would I do to prevent this
from happening to me?
Click to expand...

Assume that your drives are going to fail. Just take it as a given like
death and taxes. Prepare for the eventuality just like you do with death
and taxes.

If you're seeing multiple failures over a short time period there's some
kind of external cause, and the thing to do about it not to obtain some
kind of purported sofware fix but to find out what's killing them (power
problems, heat, vibration, etc) and correct it. And don't assume because
you have a big power supply and a UPS that you aren't seeing power
problems. I've seen brand name power supplies with plenty of reserve
capacity periodically drop the voltage on one rail or another below spec
and a few minutes later pick it back up again. That one's hard to catch.

But that just prolongs the life of the drives. Set up some kind of backup
strategy and use it. Also consider some kind of RAID--that is not a
substitute for a backup strategy though, it's a supplement.
 
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