win xp hard drive failure xp reinstalled: old data recovery?

  • Thread starter Thread starter hoodcanaljim
  • Start date Start date
H

hoodcanaljim

Hi

Enhanced IDE hard drive
Western Digital 160 gb
LBA 312581808

Last week our win xp machine suffered a melt down. It would not boot
and gave out an error about the ntfs having sector problems. A call to
M$,
and the fee, got the answer that the drive was toast and that only a
reinstall
might help. Well it did not.
We now have a drive that won't boot. I installed it in another win
xp machine
as a second drive and it is visable. But only the latest install.

Question: Can the data originally, on the hard drive in ntfs before
the new
win xp install, be recovered??
From my reading and little understanding of what I read where should I
Click to expand...
start?
copy the whole drive to a second blank drive and work on it?
can any utility see the data in the old sections of the drive?

This machine is on a home network containing 2 xp machines and 4 linux
machines.
Centos 4.2
Red Hat 7
So there are several options to chose from.

thanks
Jim
 
(e-mail address removed) wrote
Enhanced IDE hard drive
Western Digital 160 gb
LBA 312581808
Click to expand...
Last week our win xp machine suffered a melt down. It would not
boot and gave out an error about the ntfs having sector problems.
A call to M$, and the fee, got the answer that the drive was toast
and that only a reinstall might help. Well it did not.
Click to expand...
We now have a drive that won't boot. I installed it in another win xp
machine as a second drive and it is visable. But only the latest install.
Click to expand...
Question: Can the data originally, on the hard drive
in ntfs before the new win xp install, be recovered??
Click to expand...

Exactly how did you do the reinstall ? If you did a repair install,
and didnt format the partition, the data should be recoverable.
From my reading and little understanding
of what I read where should I start?
Click to expand...

Depends on the detail of how you did the reinstall.
copy the whole drive to a second blank drive and work on it?
can any utility see the data in the old sections of the drive?
Click to expand...

See above.
 
Rod said:
Exactly how did you do the reinstall ? If you did a repair install,
and didnt format the partition, the data should be recoverable.
Click to expand...

I am told no format of the hard drive was done. The reinstall was
done with the insignia (machine manufacturer) rescue disk.

Thanks
Jim
 
(e-mail address removed) wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Click to expand...
I am told no format of the hard drive was done. The reinstall
was done with the insignia (machine manufacturer) rescue disk.
Click to expand...

In that case there is unlikely to be anything recoverable now.
 
Rod said:
In that case there is unlikely to be anything recoverable now.
Click to expand...


Ouch! well I am willing to go through the steps to see if
I can get anything back.. just for drill and practice if no
other reason.

Can you help me??

Thanks
Jim
 
Rod Speed said:
(e-mail address removed) wrote



Fraid not with a rescue disk used.
Click to expand...

Those manufacturer supplied "rescue" disks are frequently designed to return
the machine to the state it was in when originally purchased - eg they help
the manufacturer satisfy the warranty conditions in the cheapest way
possible and stuff the customers data.

In future the best way to proceed is to install a new drive and run the
rescue program on that. Then connect up your old drive as a slave to see if
any data can be recovered.

Just for info... If your drive has started to give bad sectors it's possible
that running the rescue disk has only made the problem go away temporarily.
Personally I would not rely on that drive now. You can buy 80Byte drives
quite cheap now. While you are at it buy 2 and put one in an External Drive
enclosure - backup C: to this drive nightly/weekly using a program like
Ghost (use the option to split the image to 600MByte files) and burn copies
CD/DVD monthly or similar.
 
Ouch! well I am willing to go through the steps to see if
I can get anything back.. just for drill and practice if no
other reason.

Can you help me??
Click to expand...

First, I would do a sector for sector image backup of the affected drive.
You can do this with Ghost v8.x and earlier - not sure about the newer
versions because they are based on different technology. Also Zvi Netiv
has a program has a program called Clonedisk that will do this,
http://resq.co.il/download/

Once you've got a good drive with the wanted data on it, hook it up to a
Windows machine as a secondary drive. (Of course, you can just use the
problem drive itself but the recovery procedures may not work with the
first program you try and since these procedures are disk intensive you
may cause the final failure of that drive. If you work from a known good
drive, you only need to use the bad drive once when you clone it.) Anyhow,
you will also need a drive on this machine with room to store the
recovered files.

Then you need to install one of a variety of programs that can scan the
entire drive not just the file tables (which were probably overwritten
when you followed the advice to reinstall Windows) and can reassemble and
recover files based on their headers and sector links.

Such programs are (in no particular order):
R-Studio http://www.r-studio.com/
GetDataBack http://www.runtime.org/
iRecover http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/
Ontrack Easy Recovery http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/
Active Undelete http://www.active-undelete.com
Stellar Phoenix http://www.stellarinfo.com
File Scavenger http://www.quetek.com
I'm sure there are many others.

You run the selected program, let it scan all the disk's sectors and try
to find the old files, then copy them to the recovery drive. There will
be many corrupted files since the programs cannot tell which are valid
files and which are old intentionally deleted files and bits of files.

Once you're done with that you should probably run the harddrive
manufacturer's diagnostic tool (downloaded from their website) on the
damaged drive to see if the errors warrant a replacement or if you can
just zero out the drive and reuse it.
 
Back
Top