Recovering stuff off a messed up Hard Drive?

PaddyofNine

A power surge ****ed up my computer to the point that Windows wouldn't open up, but in the meantime I've gotten a new laptop. However there's some stuff on my old computer, a couple of gigs of photos and movies, that I stupidly hadn't backed up. This stuff is all in the My Documents folder, and is of great personal value. My question is thus - is there any way to recover the stuff? A program I can download, or a service in Dublin or something? I'd be gutted if I couldn't get this stuff back.

dazftw

There is an English service that does this... I don't know much about recovering stuff but I do know from reading an old thread it can be very expensive!

Damien King

Where abouts are you? if yer in mayo roscommon i may be able to help out...

does the computer power up at all?

esskay

If the pc boots and then crashes loading windows, chances are most of you data will be recoverable. If you HDD is put in to another PC (as a slave drive) chances are all/most of the data can be copied off.

If the disk is not detected by you PC bios or is not spinning up, firstly try putting it in to another PC (as a slave) and if that PC can't see it I'm afraid thing don't look good.

Stevo

cousin_borat

even if it is really bad you can still get data off it. Generally as a last resort you can put a hard drive in the fridge for an hour and retry it then, Youll have a few minutes to get data off of it since the fridge shrinks the platters and the head is not in contact with the drive.

Cuddlesworth

cousin_borat wrote:

even if it is really bad you can still get data off it. Generally as a last resort you can put a hard drive in the fridge for an hour and retry it then, Youll have a few minutes to get data off of it since the fridge shrinks the platters and the head is not in contact with the drive.

I doubt a power surge would cause physical damage to a drive, if the drive wasn't powering up then I would put my money on chips on the board being blown.

PaddyofNine

The Windows loading splash screen comes up all right, but then the blue screen of death comes in about 10 seconds into that. It's a Dell Inspiron Laptop - is it tough to get the HD out, and slave it to another PC? Or is it a hatchet job?

Also, anyone know any specific companies in Dublin that could do this for me?

tippguy2

what error are you getting when the blue screen comes up

Beelzebub

PaddyofNine wrote:

The Windows loading splash screen comes up all right, but then the blue screen of death comes in about 10 seconds into that. It's a Dell Inspiron Laptop - is it tough to get the HD out, and slave it to another PC? Or is it a hatchet job?

Also, anyone know any specific companies in Dublin that could do this for me?

This happened to me once.

I inserted the XP CD and repaired the installation. NB do not choose to repair(from console) initially wait til you get past the EULA.
It looks like it's installing from scratch and you have to insert the CD key again also.

Can't guarantee that this will work for you but it's worth a try.
It worked for me.
If you wish to try this follow the first section her to the end of the screenshots:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic8356.html
G'Luck
NB Like I said there are no guarantees.

PaddyofNine

Yeah, thing is, I've lost my original Windows XP CD. It's a comedy of errors! I can use a friends Dell Windows XP CD but I don't think it'd work...

Bluetonic

Download KNOPPIX and boot using that.

Plug an external drive into the machine and copy the files from the old drive which KNOPPIX will mount to the external drive.

Simple as.

http://www.knoppix.org/

cousin_borat

Bluetonic wrote:

Download KNOPPIX and boot using that.

Plug an external drive into the machine and copy the files from the old drive which KNOPPIX will mount to the external drive.

Simple as.

http://www.knoppix.org/

Good suggestion Knoppix, especially since it's getting to the Windows Splash screen.

Beelzebub

PaddyofNine wrote:

Yeah, thing is, I've lost my original Windows XP CD. It's a comedy of errors! I can use a friends Dell Windows XP CD but I don't think it'd work...

hmm...I think it would up to the point of activation...but then you wouldn't need to activate it though would you? I'm not sure if it would have a problem with the CD Key before this.

Experts, correct me if I'm wrong on this!

PaddyofNine

I like the suggestion re: Knoppix but once downloaded, I've got all these files and a USB key. Can anyone talk me through what the hell I do next, or even point me in the direction of a tutorial on the web or something?

Cheers

Capt'n Midnight

cousin_borat wrote:

Good suggestion Knoppix, especially since it's getting to the Windows Splash screen.

yip
Knoppix will happily read some fat32 and ntfs drives that windows won't, pop in the CD, boot up and copy stuff to external drive. The Ubuntu live CD can do this too but mounting the local drives is messier.

http://s-t-d.org/ - a version of knoppix that may recover more - but I haven't used it myself

For the images (but not the movies), it looks at the bare drive not the folder structure - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

jozi

I'm using TestDisk at the min, http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Same crowd as the link Capt'n Midnight sugested. Used the program for recovering photo's as well, it just randomly names the files but it does find them

johnplayerblue

I posted here during the week with more or less the same issue as you. I'd lost a partition with 170GBs of data and then to compound the loss i formated the lost partition so windows could see it, so that was 2 formats. I was gona give up but found a gem called Active@Partition Recovery Enterprise which not only restores partitions from very bad but keeps going untill it gets to the stage where the partition is in excellent condition. When thats done, and this is the bit for you, theres a data recovery gui, or dos mode that restores every bit of data. 100%. Do a google with a certain 5 letter word download it and you will be as good as new. Just make sure you have plenty of H/D space for the job.

ucd_guy

Interesting thread. Anyone know of a way to recover photos off a laptop with this exact problem, PLUS a ****ed up DVD drive?

I've got a 2Gb USB key. Is there a way to recover the files using that?

Capt'n Midnight

for the dvd try isobuster
for images try http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

if the usb stick is not recognised as a device then not good
if its recognised as a deivce but not as a drive letter then the you can try various tools but you are looking for something like the linux utilites dd or ?ddrecover? that will copy the entire drive bit by bit to an image file , don't use utilities that write to the flash because you can't recover from their recovery attempts