Hard Disk Recovery

secret_squirrel

My dad - the computer destroyer - has managed to trash his hard drive. He's not sure what he did only that he's adamant that he didnt do a format. I've had a look at it and I cant even get WinXP to boot when the drive is connected as a slave to one of my pc's. Needless to say this makes my chances of recovering slim!

However, since he's willing to pay....and since it possibly still contains lots of sentimental photos and stuff....does anyone know of any specialist hard drive recovery companies....or any suggestions that I can try???

Sir Random

I presume you switched the jumper before connecting it as a slave?
Did your Dad hear any loud clicking/clunking from the drive over the past few weeks? That's usually what happens before a drive goes completely (time to backup).

Last time I checked, it was around €2000 to have a trashed drive's data professionally recovered, with no guarantees :eek:

secret_squirrel

hmmm 2 grand...Im not sure he's that attached to it ...although you never know.

brianc123

A company called Vogon in the UK are good
I've had to use them for work a couple of times

http://www.vogon.co.uk/

Hope this helps

Brian

secret_squirrel

Ok had a quote from a uk company for 400 sterling plus vat but will try vogon - many thanks!

BoB_BoT

before spending a fortune on it, if you know any friends or someone local that knows a bit about hardware that could have a look at the drive do it, if it's a friend they won't charge you

Mr. Fancypants

Might be worthwhile getting yourself a dos boot disk and see if you can access anything on the drive? Or even download knoppix and see if that works for ya?

secret_squirrel

Bob - I dont know anyone who knows more about hardware than me

Mr_Broaders - yea I had the boot disk idea in the back of my mind and been meaning to try it, gonna see if I can fish one out.. Knoppix might be worth a try too thanks!!

MarkR

Try here. If you can't even boot with it as slave.... Actually, i've stuck in screaming old hdd's as slaves and they all allowed the unit to boot, even if the hdd was corrupted. Is it detecting the second hd in the bios?

Mark

Jorinn

I know this is probably completely obvious, but did you try a virus scan?

As for booting WinXP off it as a slave, why would you do that? Just boot into your normal system, if the drive is connected it'll recgonise straight away and you should be able to access it.

Incidently I've had similar issues with two drives, the first one i just attached to my comp as a slave (funnily enough it would only work with my raid controllor, not on thew first two ide channels) then virus scanned it and found it had over 600 infected files or so. Fixed em and it worked.

The second one is the aforementioned clicking noise symptom, these drives generally will work some of the time but will every so often just make everything irretrievable by conventional means.

Lastly, the drive might just be completely dead, as in won't even recognise in bios, if so try entering cylinders for the drive etc. manually. if this doesn't work, um, tough I guess, soz.

secret_squirrel

Originally posted by Jorinn

As for booting WinXP off it as a slave, why would you do that? [/B]

Im not Booting from that drive - my own installation of winXP on my master wont sucessfully boot (even in safe mode) when that drive is connected! Its like it boots up most of the way - then decides to take a look at the slave drive and goes No WAY sucka......Wierd eh?

Originally posted by Jorinn
I know this is probably completely obvious, but did you try a virus scan?

If I cant boot xp with the drive connected I cant scan it. Good suggestion otherwise tho Its been lurking in the back of mind as a something to try....


Also had a quote from a proff data recovery co.... 400 sterling + vat is their cheapest option....maybe I'll get it for my dad for his next 4 birthdays

Gonna have another mess around with it this weekend.

BoB_BoT

try an external drive cradle, if you can borrow one that would be great. Throw the h/d into the usb/firewire cradle and hook it up to your system while windows is running, a presto you should have access to your drive

MarkR

There's a free trial on the ontrack site that will let you see are those files recoverable. Only problem being you can't boot with it attached. You said it booted up most of the way, have you tried through dos to access it?

Tenshot

Also try connecting it as a Secondary Master instead of Primary Slave (disconnecting your CD-ROM if necessary) - especially on Budget PCs, some of the cheap hard drives don't like to play with those from other manufacturers.

Put it back in as Primary Master again, and see if you can boot from a suitable floppy. Run FDISK and check whether it's even showing up any partitions. If so, then there's a good chance you can get most/all of the data back without having to send it off.

Can you hear the drive spinning up? Sometimes useful to hot-plug the power connector after the rest of the system has spun up (though if you decide to try this, be very careful to (a) not plug it in the wrong way around, and (b) make sure all pins make contact at the same time). If the drive's not spinning up, your drive controller may be dead - if you can find an identical drive, it's often possible to swap the controller across and recover the original data (I've done this a few times with Quantums).

muffen

What filesystem is he using?

If he's using NTFS, connect the drive as master, boot from a floppy into dos (you can find the Win98 SE bootfloppy here: http://www.bootdisk.com/), get a copy of NTFS for DOS from www.sysinternals.com, and see if you can recover any of the files.

When you connect his drive to your PC, can you find it if you search for it in the BIOS (the option is probably called HDD Auto Detect or something)?

secret_squirrel

Its the w2k version of ntfs. And the drive is being recognised by bios auto detect. Also tried manual settings in bios.

Its also spinning up - although I need to doublecheck that coz now you've got me wondering .

Will try the rest of suggestions (boot disks, hot connect) over weekend and report back - cheers folks

Incidentally i did have it up once in my old (as in no longer alive) pc as a slave. The drive just looked unformatted to my old installation of XP. The only nasty thought that keeps occuring is does anyone know what a drive looks like after some idiot (ie my dad) chooses the dreaded low level format option in the bios? He's swears blind he only messed about with master/slave jumpers ...but Im not ruling out anything

omathuna

I bet you Win XP is on Fat32 and you are trying to boot with the NTFS as Slave. This will not work, I do not know why but it won't.

Get a WIN XP install disk and boot into a recovery console (available at first menu option I think) with only the trashed HDD as master.

Then you should be able to floppy off you data. You will need an admin password (normally delafult is no password).

secret_squirrel

Nope to first - my master is NTFS,dads slave could be either tho.... think its Fat32 tho.

2nd suggestion is deffers worth a try tho.... will do it tomorry cheers!