Harddrive data recovery

Hey AO'ers

I am really hopeing that someone here can hlp me out!
I am only so-so at best with computer repairs so bear with me.

I was ask to look at a michine that would not boot.
The OS was XP home running on a P4
I could not get it to boot normal or into safe mode. Booting normal it would make it to the windows screen for a second, and the start the boot proccess over. Booting into safe mode it would just hang at MUP.sys Wether i was right or wrong i don't know, but i assumed it had a bad boot sector.
Rather than breaking out the live cd and backing everythig up i decided to just but a new hard drive and reinstall winXP, then hood the old HD up as slave to transfer files.
After a fresh install (winXP pro sp3) i shut down a installed the old hard drive.
The drive shows up, properties shows NTFS but appears to be raw (0 bytes used 0 bytes free)
I then tried to scandisk the drive several times, but it stops responding after a very short time.
Next step was to try paragon. It showed approx 75 gig used and 78 gig free (seems about right) but paragon could not access the drive either saying invalid format.
There is not much on the drive that i NEED to back up but there are some pictures that the owner really really wants to save.
Any help or advice would be wonderful

Wow i should have proof read that before i posted.
Sorry for all the typos, i posted it in a rush. If you have any questions about my post let me know.
Also sorry for the double post :p

I use this...I bought the standard license 199.00 ...I can recover up to 20 harddrives with that license.

Download the trial and see if you can see the data...it will tell you if you can recover it or not.
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/f...very-software/


I guess it would depend how much the data is worth? and if you will use the tool again.

I find it a handy tool IMHO

You can always try a repair.

good luck

MLF

I have posted this here before with mixed reactions. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Try freezing the HDD for 24 hours in a deep freeze. Then try to access the data again. Is the hard drive making a clicking or grinding sound? Or a Click-Whirr? Just curious.

I have fixed drives and been able to pull data off them using chkdsk /r

as it sound like the drives spinning up but may have some bad sectors stopping the OS from booting....or the mbr is flucked.



MLF

Quote:

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Originally Posted by westin

I have posted this here before with mixed reactions. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Try freezing the HDD for 24 hours in a deep freeze. Then try to access the data again. Is the hard drive making a clicking or grinding sound? Or a Click-Whirr? Just curious.

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There are really no sounds from the drive besides the normal faint hum

Quote:

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Originally Posted by morganlefay

I have fixed drives and been able to pull data off them using chkdsk /r

as it sound like the drives spinning up but may have some bad sectors stopping the OS from booting....or the mbr is flucked.



MLF

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I have tried checkdisk too with no results. It hangs after about 1 min. and when i check my proccesses is is not responding

Allow check disk to run it's coarse. It could take lot's of time if the Windows XP install is corrupt. If check disks fails it will give you an error.If it isn't responding it's probably because it is doing it's job. The process could take hours depending on the amount of data and the size of the drive...

You could also use DFT (drive fitness test) by Hitachi, which does a HDD integrity scan and if there are bad sectors it can also repair them.

And I also tend to freeze the HDD but I only let it get cold, not freeze. I don't like the idea of moisture freezing up inside the disc onto who knows what. I could see that causing more harm than good.

Also, attempt to use a linux live disc. Sometimes they can read the file system when a windows OS cannot. In this case you could still transfer the pics to a jump drive.

Oh, and if the MBR is screwed, there are some utilities out there (like Seagate's) that will rebuild the MBR.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clp727

Allow check disk to run it's coarse. It could take lot's of time if the Windows XP install is corrupt. If check disks fails it will give you an error.If it isn't responding it's probably because it is doing it's job.

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I and not disagreeing but just to be sure....If i do a ctrl-alt-delete and look under the applications tab, and see that chkdsk.exe is "not responding" it could still be "doing it's job"?
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I have passed the drive along to friend that is a little better with data recovery than i am although he has given up already...
From what he told me it seems the tables are reporting the capacity of the drive to be larger than what it really is (or something along those lines)
Weather that makes sense to anyone or not is beyond me, this matter was over my head when i started.
Thanks for everyones help!!!
I have not given up yet, and will still be checking this thread for ideas.
If i do figure out the issue i'll post my findings!
As for now, its beer:30

LOL, man....I've only run into that once ever, and I threw literally everything I had at it. I recovered the drive and it worked perfectly after that, but I didn't get a shred of data off of it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by keezel

LOL, man....I've only run into that once ever, and I threw literally everything I had at it. I recovered the drive and it worked perfectly after that, but I didn't get a shred of data off of it.

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That's reassuring... :D

Try spinrite

www.grc.com

(hmmm....someone say something about a bay of pirates?)

Have you tried the Live CD yet?

I ran into a very similar recovery a month or two ago.
The chkdsk /r command failed and from a bootable ERD
cd, the NTFS partition had a similar 'raw' format, 0 bytes
used, 0 bytes free. Booted to an Insert cd with a usb
drive, mounted both the hdd and sda and recovered
everything. It was about a 3 hour job, but well worth
it.

Funny how the drive was mountable in Linux and all
but invisible booting to a Windows/ERD cd.

Ok i am back to working on this issue.. I got sidetracked getting the fresh install set up so the owner would atleast have a Computer again.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by brokencrow

Have you tried the Live CD yet?

I ran into a very similar recovery a month or two ago.
The chkdsk /r command failed and from a bootable ERD
cd, the NTFS partition had a similar 'raw' format, 0 bytes
used, 0 bytes free. Booted to an Insert cd with a usb
drive, mounted both the hdd and sda and recovered
everything. It was about a 3 hour job, but well worth
it.

Funny how the drive was mountable in Linux and all
but invisible booting to a Windows/ERD cd.

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I have tried one live cd with out much luck, although it was a linux (Gparted)
disk, and i have NO linux skills...The kernel has always confused me.
I am going to have to do a little research before i can try your suggestion. I have never "mounted" a HDD. The only mounting i have done has been iso's or Bin/Cue files.. Do i need to make an image of the drive to mount?
Sorry if these are n00bish questions but i am flying high over my ski's with this issue!

Try an Ubuntu or Knoppix live disc. Pretty straightforward and they tend to automatically mount the drive if it's already plugged in.

Hmmm,

I have only found freezing the drive useful if it has a physical (spinup) problem. For straight data corruption it really doesn't do anything IMO.

http://www.roadkil.net/

roadkil's "unstoppable copier" is about the best data recovery tool I am aware of, as it just reads the file in its raw, damaged or corrupted condition and attempts to reassemble the files that it finds.

Get yourself a couple of six-packs as it does take rather a long time :D

Good luck!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drscratchnsniff

I have tried one live cd with out much luck, although it was a linux (Gparted) disk...

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I think Gparted is too specialized (partitioning) for what you want. Like
keezel points out, Knoppix or Ubuntu would be good choices.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drscratchnsniff

...and i have NO linux skills...The kernel has always confused me.

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That can be tough. It's pretty much "command line" (shell). You only
need to know the 'mount' and 'mc' commands to do a simple recovery,
along with some kind of usb drive. The first harddrive is going to show
as /dev/hda/ while a usb drive shows up as /dev/sda (generally!). Boot
up to the live cd with the usb drive plugged in and all the drives it sees
will be listed in the /etc/fstab file. The 'fdisk' command will list partitions
on the hdd.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drscratchnsniff

I have never "mounted" a HDD. The only mounting i have done has been iso's or Bin/Cue files.. Do i need to make an image of the drive to mount?

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No, you don't make an image. Windows automatically mounts drives,
Linux does not necessarily do so. So you do it manually in Linux. Some
of the newer distros are better about automounting drives. Here's a
site for Linux commands:

http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl.htm

I will be trying some more linux live cd's this weekend for sure..
I took a break from the drive to keep myself from throwing it out the window.
I'll keep you posted!
Thanks for all the help!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drscratchnsniff

I will be trying some more linux live cd's this weekend for sure..
I took a break from the drive to keep myself from throwing it out the window.
I'll keep you posted!
Thanks for all the help!

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Lol I've been there. Probably we all have.

Just to reassure your nerves, Knoppix and Ubuntu both come with a decent GUI that makes it far easier to work with. I could be tried for heresy for saying this, but it creates an environment fairly similar to what you're used to in Windows.

On the bright side, you're learning a lot in a short span of time. Most people pay for that. ;)

Download Knoppix here: Knoppix

Download Ubuntu here: Ubuntu

Either link should download a roughly 750 MB file (takes quite awhile). You would then burn this "image" to a disc using Nero or UltraISO or something. I'm pretty sure the latter has a free trial.

Your next step is to put the disc in the computer, power it off, power it back on, and right as the first black screen comes on, look for a menu option like "Press F10 to view boot options" and have the computer boot from the CD. Alternatively you can press F2 or delete at startup to get into the BIOS and make sure it doesn't boot to the HDD before it boots to a CD.

Feel free to ask any questions and try not to get too terribly stressed out! :p

Try burning puppy linux

www.puppylinux.org


It's only 94 mb

Includes gparted and all you need to mount and view/copy from your disks

Well i just tried Ubuntu
I can't get Ubuntu loaded while i have the bad HDD installed.
I wish i knew how i could do a print screen while it was trying to load. Since i dont know if that is possible i will try to type what i see when its trying to load.
_____________________________________________________________________________

XXX.XXXXXX ata.01: status {drdy err}
XXX.XXXXXX ata.01: ERROR {UNC}
XXX.XXXXXX ata.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
XXX.XXXXXX ata.01: BMDMA stat 0x65
XXX.XXXXXX ata.01:cmd 25/00:02:73:a6:d2/00:00:11:00:00/f0 tag 0 dma 1024 i
____________________________________________________________________________
The xxx.xxxxxx represent #'s..It just keeps scrolling this then a long pause and finally a blank screen. If i hit Enter at the blank screen i go back to a cmd prompt type screen.

I am guessing that these are sectors being checked and they are failing? just guessing :P
Any suggestions?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by C:\Saw

Try burning puppy linux

www.puppylinux.org


It's only 94 mb

Includes gparted and all you need to mount and view/copy from your disks

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Think i'll give this a try now :D

Thought i might also add that i have a good drive set as master and the bad drive as slave. Although very slow i Boot into windows with this set up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drscratchnsniff

I can't get Ubuntu loaded while i have the bad HDD installed.

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That's not a good sign. Typically Ubuntu automounts a
PC's harddrives. And Ubuntu won't even load with the
bad drive installed? Run fdisk if you can get Linux booted
to find out the status of the partition(s) on the bad drive.

Sounds like it may be beyond repair. You might try it
on a different PC and/or using a SATA/IDE-to-USB cable.
That's a great piece of equipment to have and only runs
$20-30.

Well, if you can boot into Windows then that is a start.

You will need a partition on your working master drive or an external drive at least the size of the defective one.

Load roadkil's "unstoppable copier" onto your master drive (not the recovery partition of course) or some other media and try to run it against the defective drive.

This software doesn't care about your partition tables MBRs or crap like that. It will even work (within limitations) on drives that are physically and/or electronically damaged. I am not aware of any other free data recovery product that will do this. It is available in both Linux and Windows versions BTW.

:)

All righty ladies and gents,
Thank you sooo much for all the advice. I never did get the drive mounted with a Linux OS,
but after playing with Spinrite a bit i decided to try somemore recovery software. I am not sure if spinrite helped or not but after spinrite i ran "Active@ File Recovery" and the scan made it all the way through to 100% :D
I have about 50% of the data a need recovered backed up now on an external drive..Its slow but its working :D
Thanks again for everyones help! Nice active board here. I know my post count does not reflect it but i have been lurking around this site for years now (even before i joined)
I can never really comment on threads here because soo much of it is over my head, but i have learned alot from the members here just from lurking.
Peace
Mike

Thanks for the feedback Mike.

Spinrite and active@ are both commercial products, I am afraid you did not say you were prepared to pay ;)

That explains why the suggested solutions were basically zero cost.

:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nihil

Thanks for the feedback Mike.

Spinrite and active@ are both commercial products, I am afraid you did not say you were prepared to pay ;)

That explains why the suggested solutions were basically zero cost.

:)

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HEHE...i understand.

I personally was not willing to pay, but my client (client, for lack of a better word)was.
Spinrite seems like a nice little app. Courious what some of you more experinced guys think of it.

Also still courious what the exact issue with the drive was/is. If it was infact the partition table, how does something like that get messed up like that. I know the family that owns this pc uses it mainly for general internet and email. They dont really do any downloading or anything like that. I have been the only person that has worked on thier computer for a few years and i have even noticed they dont pick up as much malware as other comps i have cleaned up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drscratchnsniff

Spinrite seems like a nice little app. Courious what some of you more experinced guys think of it.

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I like Spinrite. I've had varying results using v6. The first drive I ever used it on was not only totally recovered, but even useable again. Freaked me out. Other times, Spinrite yields nothing after running for days. Results depend more on the condition of the drive than anything.

In a sense, time is of essence when dealing with a failed hdd. Not necessarily in terms of hours and days, but a bad hdd only has so much life left in it before it TOTALLY fails. If a drive's going bad, trying to boot from it again and again can make recovery tougher. I always opt for a simple recovery to begin with, such as booting from a PE or Live CD. Then I resort to something like Spinrite or Active File Recovery (I need to give RoadKil a try soon).

Quote:

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Also still courious what the exact issue with the drive was/is. If it was infact the partition table, how does something like that get messed up like that.

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Sadly, computer hardware has a short lifespan, typically 3 years. Some brands are junk (H*****i for one). Harddrives are probably more sensitive to power supply than commonly assumed. Data, including partition tables, are written to sectors on the drive, and if that sector that part of the partition table is written on goes bad, then the partition table becomes unrecognizeable. Apps like chkdsk (built into Windows) typically mark a sector bad and move the data to a different sector (I've had good success using chkdsk). There's a lot that can go wrong with a hdd as it typically has more moving parts than any other part of a computer. IMLU (in my limited understanding).

I too normaly have good luck with chkdsk.. I think this is the first time i have ever had it completly fail. It just seemed every sector was bad. I found it funny that the 120 gig drive was showing 160 gig.
I personaly have had great luck with HDD's in general although after reading your post and dealing with this drive, i am going to make for sure all my important data is backed up.
I can't remember the last time i bought a new HDD.. I get so many junk computers to scrap out i have just been using old used drives...Might be time to go shopping!