Help Backing up a HDD.

I just pulled out a HDD from an ancient computer. Its around 10 Gigs big (Surprising for a 200mhz PC). I'm trying to back it up, so I can burn some of the content into a CD and hand it over to its owner. The PC that he was using didn't have any USB ports or any other means of backing stuff up, except the floppy. I've installed the HDD in my own PC, which it reads it, but when I double click to open the drive, it says thats its not formated. I'm using XP, the HDD is in FAT32. I tried accessing it through the command Prompt...still no luck. I cannot backup everything into my own HDD because its filled with viruses/spyware/trojans and I do not have 10 gigs free in my HDD to back it up to. I was wondering if there's any way I could access it and sort out the materials that I need to back up. If there's any freeware tools out there that will allow me to do that, that would be great. I cannot backup everything, I just need a way to get in, and delete some stuff before I can back it up.

Thank you in advance

cybr1d.

You should be able to see the contents given what you have said, the chances are the fat tables are corrupt leading to the problems you are having.

I think you will nead a recovery utility to view the conntents of the drive. There are plenty to choose from just google for data recovery. Alot of what you will find will be trials that will recover files upto a certain size. I have had this myself.

Jinxy

I was doing good right up until the part when you said you can't back it up to your HDD because yours is contaminated, but at first you said you were trying to back it up??? :confused:

Can I correctly asume that your backup is going to consist of burning the contents to CD? Or not.. that's a lot of CD's.

If you were me (and you're not :D ) I would see if I can access the contents with knoppix... (not knoppix std, because that mounts read only IIRC )...

But the big question is still, where are you backing it up to?

Did the drive work in his machine?
Can you virus scan the drive when it is hooked up to you machine?
Any chance of attaching your burner to his machine and burning at the slowest speed?

Go into the Bios and re-detect the drive.restart and try again.If not joy, try scan disk error checking.You might be able to save the data it if it got tiny amount of bad sectors,

Dr_Evil :)

groov, sorry for the confusion. The HDD i'm planning on backing up is contaminated. I only want to back up just a few of its content (Excel worksheets and word documents). Those will be burned into a CD.

A couple of utilities I tried would only back up from one HDD(the whole HDD) to the other, and my own HDD does not have enough space to do that.



Dr.Evil, the bios reads the HDD and reconfigures itself to the new settings. the HDD shows up under "My Computer" but when I click on it, it tells me its unformated and asks if I want to format it now.

Have you scanned it for error checking (bad sectors?)

Have a look at some of the apps here:
http://www.snapfiles.com/shareware/s...arecovery.html

Are you able to access the hard drive with any utilities at all?

ie, if you use something like PC File Inspector Recovery, is it able to read it?

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

you shoukd use any frorensic analiser, y will give you acceses even if the boot sector of the hard drive is corrupted, something like that hapen to me some time ago...also, sou could use an HDD ex editor, and recreate de boot sector of the partiton.....

if anything works....go truugth the hard way...use asssembler...

First off, get yourself a copy of The Ultimate Boot CD then attach your drive as the master on your primary IDE and disconnect your other drive. See if you can boot from the HDD itself, if you can grab your files, RAR them up and stash them on an FTP, otherwise boot the UBCD and run the diagnostics program which matches the drives manufacturer and see what the condition the drive is in, depending on that you may have to get more in depth and use some data recovery tools.


-Maestr0

Along with everyone elses suggestions..

If the other PC would boot it... throw a network card in there and put it on a private network with the machine you want to back it up with. Share the drive of the machine you want to backup. (leave it on a test network with no internet access). Make sure the machine that you are backing it up to has up2date AV so you don't infect that PC too.

IIRC, Sometimes it depends on how the partition was created. I've had this happen when I tried to put a slave drive that was an extended partition and not primary partition. You are allowed up to 4 primary and 1 extended partitions. If you have 2 extended partitions... it won't be able to read it.