Data recovery, again!

I had a friend give me her boss' disk for data recovery. The disk is detectable in the BIOS but neither Windows nor Linux are able to see the disk (not even as a physical device, forget partitions). Linux is slightly better in that it can see the disk (but not access it), telling me that sector 0 is bad.
The disk has no partitions (all of them got dropped in the failure). The other thing I've tried is spinrite, which completed 34 mb of a 200 gb disk in 12 hours.
Any suggestions?

Cheers,
cgkanchi

In another development, I can now get Windows to see the drive (don't ask how, it just happened). So now, I *should* be able to run the more traditional type of data recovery operations. However, on attempting the slightest read or write operation to the disk, the hard disk light comes on and stays on, slowing my computer down to a crawl (it's expected I know, but this is even before an operation is started, and surely it doesn't take 10 minutes to remap drives from the BIOS). Not even a hard reset gets the light off. The only way to get my comp to boot again is to turn it off completely and switch it on again.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Howdy.

Have you tried giving Helix a go? It's a forensic's thing that they use to gather forensic information from.
Maybe it might be able to help in some way..

f2B

That was what I meant by Linux. I was using Helix.

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Hmmmm,

I am afraid it does not sound too good :(

I would possibly try spinrite for longer. If the damage is at the beginning of the disk then that may take much longer and the process could speed up once that is resolved? Spinrite doesn't go that quickly IIRC.

You will need another 200GB HDD, but this may work:

http://www.roadkil.net/unstopcp.html

It attempts to recover file fragments and reassemble them irrespective of what they are, partitions and so on.

It is non-destructive and is intended to work with damaged disks as well as scrambled ones, so it may work faster?

Good luck :)

Heh, the unstoppable copier requires that there be a partition on the source drive. This, unfortunately doesn't exist. The disk is fux0red. It looks like someone took a large and extremely efficient electromagnet to the disk ;).

Cheers,
cgkanchi

PS: Sabotage can be ruled out actually, since this happened immediately after a very short power outage (less than a minute)

Well I had this problem recently and using Windows and OnTRack Easy recovery software I was able to recover the data....


although it does sound like the disk may be physically damaged :(

They have a trial version that you can try to see if it will work before you buy....

http://www.ontrack.com/

Maybe worth a try???

Guess it all depends on how valuable the data is....

MLF

Not to take this offtopic... posting this out of curiousity.
But when disks become unreadable, I have heard that people have frozen them... and then miraculously they drive worked thereafter! I didn't believe it at first but apparently it has truely worked. Anyone here ever tried that? If so, under what circumstances was it frozen, and how did freezing it solve the problem?

heheh BTW, don't try this if this is your bosses disk/data... I'd hate to hear that you hosed the drive because you heard freezing it might fix it.

Hi Eyecre8

Yes I have done that a few times....................I guess that the success rate has been around 60~65%. It is one to try if the actual drive is on its last legs and is not spinning properly, and has a W/R heads issue. You get about 30 minutes to grab what you can.

This one sounds more like an EMP problem? Freezing won't help that :(

I am trying to remember that tool we were messing with on here a couple of years back "WinHex" I think that it was called................we were testing these "erasing tools" and it had a pretty good recovery success rate. It is more designed for deliberate attempts to bulk erase the HDD.

I think that you can get a 28 day or 30 day trial?

Another one to think about trying? That is the problem, this sort of situation isn't the old "oh £$%^& I didn't mean to delete that" scenario.

;)

Actually, it looks like the problem isn't with the actual media but with one of the chips on the disk. Because occasionally, it'll work for 15 minutes or so. I was actually able to run testdisk on it completely from within helix before it gave up again. I'm on the verge of giving up, probably will try freezing it once just to see if it works. Unfortunately, half an hour isn't going to be anywhere near enough to get the data off the disk, since there are no partitions and as far as I can see, no FAT on the disk.
And MLF, I did try ontrack to see if it worked, no cigar. I'm going to try for a day or two more, but if I can't do it, I'll just return the disk and give them the address of a professional data recovery firm though I'm fairly certain that if I can't do it with software, those guys can't as well (unless they take out the platters and put them into a new disk).

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Arrrrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

OK cgkanchi I was just clearing my throat, and that which passes for a brain :rolleyes:

Morgana~ gave a clear clue? This will take some courage and some guaranteed funding. You need the same drive, and swap the drive's controller card. I have done that with 100% success on several occasions (OK about 10 in six years).

I must admit that Ihave not done it with a modern 200Mb drive but it certainly worked with 40's and 60's.

:)

might want to give the old school Spin Rite a whirl. I have recovered many a disk with a bad sector 0 error in the past. It takes a while and doesn't work all the time but it might be worth a try.


*EDIT*


Just saw that Nihil mentioned Spinrite in his first post. I would still recommend that you give it a try. It can take a couple of days on a very large drive that is reporting sector 0 bad though. I ran it on a 300gb drive a few weeks back and it took 4 days with deep inspection turned on.

I recovered the drive though :)