Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.
Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
explain the situation in more detail:
Causes for Concern:
------------------------------
- I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
as a Master.
- When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
format the drive.
Causes for Optimism:
--------------------------------
- On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
the copying.
- The drive is always detected by the BIOS
- There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.
Going Forward
----------------------
A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
values I can't recall.
My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.
Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
likely to be successful.
The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.
"Matt" <mattb95@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c377a5ad-4d29-4758-bf67-8068f3021cd1@s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.
Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
explain the situation in more detail:
Causes for Concern:
------------------------------
- I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
as a Master.
- When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
format the drive.
Causes for Optimism:
--------------------------------
- On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
the copying.
- The drive is always detected by the BIOS
- There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.
Going Forward
----------------------
A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
values I can't recall.
My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.
Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
likely to be successful.
The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.
Kind Regards,
Matthew Boulton
I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather severe
read/write errors
but I could intermittantly copy data. I basically just kept trying...and
though I had to skip a few files that were unable to be copied...
I was able to recover about 98% of the data. I think it took about 6 hours
total.
The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.
> I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather severe
> read/write errors
> but I could intermittantly copy data. I basically just kept trying...and
> though I had to skip a few files that were unable to be copied...
> I was able to recover about 98% of the data. I think it took about 6 hours
> total.
>
> The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.
>
> DVD burners and DVD's are very inexpensive!
Compared to the potential cost of having it repaired by a data
recovery company, I couldn't agree more now!
"Matt" <mattb95@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c377a5ad-4d29-4758-bf67-8068f3021cd1@s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
Have you tried the "freezer" trick? Put the drive into a ziplock bag and
stick it in the freezer for a few hours. Once it's good and cold, stick it
in the PC as slave and get as much data off the drive as you can. It might
take a few tries depending on how long it takes.
"Matt" <mattb95@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:48b66f4f-2e89-4b55-b25c-4d03de33a287@c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> > I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather severe
> > read/write errors
> > but I could intermittantly copy data. I basically just kept trying...and
> > though I had to skip a few files that were unable to be copied...
> > I was able to recover about 98% of the data. I think it took about 6
hours
> > total.
> >
> > The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.
> >
> > DVD burners and DVD's are very inexpensive!
>
> Compared to the potential cost of having it repaired by a data
> recovery company, I couldn't agree more now!
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Matt
Good luck and just keep trying.
In my case, I found that after the drive ran for a few hours it started
working better...
but your results may vary of course.
If it does not allow data to be read when it's warm...
let it sit overnight and try it again when it's cool.
> Good luck and just keep trying.
> In my case, I found that after the drive ran for a few hours it started
> working better...
> but your results may vary of course.
>
> If it does not allow data to be read when it's warm...
> let it sit overnight and try it again when it's cool.
Sadly I've not been able to gather any more data from it at all today,
and I'm not sure stressing the drive out is a good idea in case I am
making the situation worse.
>
> Have you tried the "freezer" trick? Put the drive into a ziplock bag and
> stick it in the freezer for a few hours. Once it's good and cold, stick it
> in the PC as slave and get as much data off the drive as you can. It might
> take a few tries depending on how long it takes.
>
But it is still working. There is no need for the freezer trick in
this case.
"On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS."
I would try and copy the drive, sector by sector, to another drive.
Then work with the second drive, and see what is possible with a
recovery application. (Working with a damaged surface, means never
knowing what attempts to repair the disk might do.) "dd" in Linux
or the dd port for Windows, would be a way to do that, if no other
free application was available.
A search on
"sector by sector" windows
may turn up possible ways of copying a drive sector by sector.
By doing it that way, that avoids a lot of random head movement
on the bad drive.
I'm suggesting the copy method, based on damage done by a
recovery application once, that tried to repair a disk
structure, and instead made it worse. The best kind of
application, should try to copy data it finds, to a second
drive, rather than messing about with a damaged disk.
At a time like this, having a couple spare drives to play with
is a cheap alternative to paying $500 to $1000 for professional
recovery.
"Matt" <mattb95@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:4c0d12b5-89e3-4e11-ab96-c2a90e80218e@d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> > Good luck and just keep trying.
> > In my case, I found that after the drive ran for a few hours it started
> > working better...
> > but your results may vary of course.
> >
> > If it does not allow data to be read when it's warm...
> > let it sit overnight and try it again when it's cool.
>
> Sadly I've not been able to gather any more data from it at all today,
> and I'm not sure stressing the drive out is a good idea in case I am
> making the situation worse.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Matt
"Paul" <nospam@needed.com> wrote in message news:fspaso$168$1@aioe.org...
> Calab wrote:
>
> >
> > Have you tried the "freezer" trick? Put the drive into a ziplock bag
and
> > stick it in the freezer for a few hours. Once it's good and cold, stick
it
> > in the PC as slave and get as much data off the drive as you can. It
might
> > take a few tries depending on how long it takes.
> >
>
> But it is still working. There is no need for the freezer trick in
> this case.
>
> "On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
> able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
> slave either in XP or in DOS."
>
> I would try and copy the drive, sector by sector, to another drive.
> Then work with the second drive, and see what is possible with a
> recovery application. (Working with a damaged surface, means never
> knowing what attempts to repair the disk might do.) "dd" in Linux
> or the dd port for Windows, would be a way to do that, if no other
> free application was available.
>
> A search on
>
> "sector by sector" windows
>
> may turn up possible ways of copying a drive sector by sector.
> By doing it that way, that avoids a lot of random head movement
> on the bad drive.
>
> I'm suggesting the copy method, based on damage done by a
> recovery application once, that tried to repair a disk
> structure, and instead made it worse. The best kind of
> application, should try to copy data it finds, to a second
> drive, rather than messing about with a damaged disk.
>
> At a time like this, having a couple spare drives to play with
> is a cheap alternative to paying $500 to $1000 for professional
> recovery.
>
> Paul
It looks like the fairly common read/write error.
If so, a "sector by sector copy" will be at least as difficult as simply
trying to copy the data.
The freezer trick, though I've seen it called an urban myth did work for me
on one occasion.
Of course that could have just been a co-incidence as there were perhaps a
dozen other times I tried
it with no results
> It looks like the fairly common read/write error.
> If so, a "sector by sector copy" will be at least as difficult as simply
> trying to copy the data.
How likely is it that I will be able to recover the data if that is
the case?
Matt wrote:
>
>> I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather
>> severe read/write errors but I could intermittantly copy data. I
>> basically just kept trying...and though I had to skip a few files
>> that were unable to be copied... I was able to recover about 98%
>> of the data. I think it took about 6 hours total.
>>
>> The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.
>
> DVD burners and DVD's are very inexpensive!
>
> Compared to the potential cost of having it repaired by a data
> recovery company, I couldn't agree more now!
Or the cost of a replacement hard drive. Install one, and
periodically clone it from the current system.
Please don't remove attribute lines for material you quote. Those
are the initial lines that read "joe wrote:".
--
[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]: <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>
Try the download section.
"Matt" <mattb95@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c377a5ad-4d29-4758-bf67-8068f3021cd1@s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.
Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
explain the situation in more detail:
Causes for Concern:
------------------------------
- I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
as a Master.
- When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
format the drive.
Causes for Optimism:
--------------------------------
- On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
the copying.
- The drive is always detected by the BIOS
- There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.
Going Forward
----------------------
A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
values I can't recall.
My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.
Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
likely to be successful.
The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.
Kind Regards,
Matthew Boulton
Before sending the drive off for professional recovery I'd download Sidux or
PCLinuxOS live cd, burn it, and then run it on the affected computer to see
if the Linux operating system can successfully access the NTFS partitions on
the hard drive. It can access them on an uncorrupted drive for sure. If it
successfully accesses the partitions you can possibly save the files to a
USB flash drive or cd. Since you would be running a live cd, you would not
be taking the chance of corrupting the data further. I've done this
successfully on many occasions but I have to tell you that on one occasion
even Sidux couldn't recover the files and my friend lost a few years of
pictures. However, as I say, it's worth the effort. Good luck and best
wishes....JG
> Before sending the drive off for professional recovery I'd download Sidux or
> PCLinuxOS live cd, burn it, and then run it on the affected computer to see
> if the Linux operating system can successfully access the NTFS partitions on
> the hard drive. It can access them on an uncorrupted drive for sure. If it
> successfully accesses the partitions you can possibly save the files to a
> USB flash drive or cd. *Since you would be running a live cd, you would not
> be taking the chance of corrupting the data further. *I've done this
> successfully on many occasions but I have to tell you that on one occasion
> even Sidux couldn't recover the files and my friend lost a few years of
> pictures. *However, as I say, it's worth the effort. *Good luck and best
> wishes....JG
Isn't any kind of reading of the drive going to possibly make matters
worse though?If that isn't the case, then it sounds like an excellent
idea.
> I would try and copy the drive, sector by sector, to another
> drive. Then work with the second drive,
You think?
I find it so incredibly frustrating that people don't know enough to
make backups, and then even some of the regulars in here aren't
bright/experienced enough to tell the guy to make a copy of the disk
before he messes with it. By screwing with the original disk, he's
making the same idiotic mistake he made before things went wrong.
Matt wrote:
> Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
> for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
> data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
> lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
> I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
>
> The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
> meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
> of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
> constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
> store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
> is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.
>
> Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
> with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
> explain the situation in more detail:
>
> Causes for Concern:
> ------------------------------
>
> - I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
> as a Master.
>
> - When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
> drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
> XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
> I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
> format the drive.
>
> Causes for Optimism:
> --------------------------------
>
> - On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
> able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
> slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
> system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
> the copying.
>
> - The drive is always detected by the BIOS
>
> - There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
> hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.
>
> Going Forward
> ----------------------
>
> A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
> called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
> Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
> was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
> partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
> quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
> numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
> values I can't recall.
>
> My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
> data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
> the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.
>
> Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
> what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
> From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
> likely to be successful.
>
> The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Matthew Boulton
I've seen drives where the heads have hit. And then they toss shreds of
dirt into the cavity. Yes, then this is going to possibly cause issues
the more you move it and spin it and the dirt continues to scratch the
surface. But you would have to have a pretty good shock. Not true
of a drive just sitting in your cabinet and one day it starts to die.
Or at least it was never my experience. I only saw one of the many I
replaced.
Unfortunately, when electronics die, they die. As all have said, hot
and cold are your only tools now, along with time.
"Matt" <mattb95@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:892d0cba-6ed0-47c3-8891-c83ed8209508@u10g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
> Before sending the drive off for professional recovery I'd download Sidux
> or
> PCLinuxOS live cd, burn it, and then run it on the affected computer to
> see
> if the Linux operating system can successfully access the NTFS partitions
> on
> the hard drive. It can access them on an uncorrupted drive for sure. If it
> successfully accesses the partitions you can possibly save the files to a
> USB flash drive or cd. Since you would be running a live cd, you would not
> be taking the chance of corrupting the data further. I've done this
> successfully on many occasions but I have to tell you that on one occasion
> even Sidux couldn't recover the files and my friend lost a few years of
> pictures. However, as I say, it's worth the effort. Good luck and best
> wishes....JG
Isn't any kind of reading of the drive going to possibly make matters
worse though?If that isn't the case, then it sounds like an excellent
idea.
Kind Regards,
Matt
I doubt it will make it worse. Most 'nix distros have a bootable CD version
you can download and run without installing. Just boot it up and try to read
the drive and save to some sort of media. I have seen this work before when
Windows couldn't see the drive. I would certainly give it a try before
sending the drive off to a very expensive data recovery company.
Matt wrote:
> Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
> for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
> data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
> lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
> I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
>
> The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
> meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
> of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
> constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
> store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
> is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.
>
> Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
> with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
> explain the situation in more detail:
>
> Causes for Concern:
> ------------------------------
>
> - I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
> as a Master.
>
> - When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
> drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
> XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
> I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
> format the drive.
>
> Causes for Optimism:
> --------------------------------
>
> - On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
> able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
> slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
> system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
> the copying.
>
> - The drive is always detected by the BIOS
>
> - There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
> hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.
>
> Going Forward
> ----------------------
>
> A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
> called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
> Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
> was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
> partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
> quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
> numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
> values I can't recall.
>
> My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
> data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
> the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.
>
> Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
> what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
> From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
> likely to be successful.
>
> The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Matthew Boulton
The last time I had a similar problem I used Spinrite, which uses a DOS
boot diskette, to repair the damage to the drive enough to use Ghost to
copy all the information to a new drive. Much cheaper than using a
recovery firm.
Recovering Data on a Failing Hard Drive 
Linear Mode
