Hard drive crashed, data recovery?

meowCat

Hello everyone,

my hard drive died last weekend. It first made some funny noise and then nothing would start up any more. I have a backup from November but honestly, I cannot remember if I changed much afterwards on a particular folder that contains important data.

My problem now is how to recover the data. The hd contained two partitions C and D, both NTFS. There is a particular folder on the D partition that I need to get data off (my thesis stuff -->>>> IMPORTANT).

Initially, I put it into a case and hooked it up via usb. It displayed the folder structure but it wouldn't allow me to copy anything.

The IT supp guy in my company recommended I put it into the freezer for a couple of hours. He suggested that it might have gotten overheated. But that didn't work and afterwards it didn't even show the folder structure any more.

I left the hd with him for a while and he did some magic with it. The C partition could be partially read but the D partition wasn't accessible. He then used a tool to take an image of the D partition and managed to retrieve some data out of the image. However, the files I really needed weren't among those.

Does anyone have any idea what else I could try??
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
mC.

irlrobins

Sounds like your IT guy is reasonably knowledgeable and has had some success. But since his exhaustive actions have so far failed to recover the data, then the next step would be to take the HD to a professional Data Recovery firm. This of course will be pricey (~€500+). But I imagine this might be a price you're willing to pay considering the lengths you've gone through so far.

A search of the forum will throw up threads of firms who do this work.

Best of luck!

meowCat

Thanks for your reply irlrobins.
I'm not prepared though to pay that much.

Anyone else any ideas???

10-10-20

Yes, go with the previous advice.
Further actions on your part may further damage the data and reduce the likelihood of ANY recovery.

Keano

Might be worth having a look at this article

disk-recovery

irlrobins

That won't be of much help. It's only useful if you can't boot the OS. This is a physical failure of the HD.

Capt'n Midnight

Try running photorec on the image that was made of \

sometimes a drive will be recognised more easily on an ide cable than in a usb enclosure, but then you'd need a adaptor to put in a deasktop or a linux boot disk

ddrescue might be an option and then run photorec on that file since it's raw

junkster12345

meowCat wrote: »

Hello everyone,

my hard drive died last weekend. It first made some funny noise and then nothing would start up any more. I have a backup from November but honestly, I cannot remember if I changed much afterwards on a particular folder that contains important data.

My problem now is how to recover the data. The hd contained two partitions C and D, both NTFS. There is a particular folder on the D partition that I need to get data off (my thesis stuff -->>>> IMPORTANT).

Initially, I put it into a case and hooked it up via usb. It displayed the folder structure but it wouldn't allow me to copy anything.

The IT supp guy in my company recommended I put it into the freezer for a couple of hours. He suggested that it might have gotten overheated. But that didn't work and afterwards it didn't even show the folder structure any more.

I left the hd with him for a while and he did some magic with it. The C partition could be partially read but the D partition wasn't accessible. He then used a tool to take an image of the D partition and managed to retrieve some data out of the image. However, the files I really needed weren't among those.

Does anyone have any idea what else I could try??
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
mC.

your the first person doing a thesis that has said " it aint that important""as in i mean you aint willing to pay that much" if it is your thesis, get some money from somebody and get it professionally seen to, it's your thesis for f**k sake, other that that, leave it be and go fail.

Xhristy

This post has been deleted.

Hal1

'Get data back' is another one worth having a look at. There is a utility which has loads of goodies like this, search 'boot cd'.

gamer

Look at pcinspector.de , free recovery program download.i suggest carefully set it up as a slave drive d .Theres a freezer trick for dodgy hardrives,google freezer hard drive trick.

Ponster

SpinRite has saved me in the past too. Took 1.5 days of spinning though

meowCat

Thanks a lot for all your replies.

@gamer: I have tried pcinspector but it doesn't access the D partition. It seems "something" but is not able to do anything on it. And have tried the freezer thing already. Didn't work

@spinrite_recommenders: Did the program help ye with an actual hardware failure of the drive or was it just something that wouldn't allow the OS to start and you needed to save the data? I checked the web page and it looks like the program is suitable for the latter cases.

For the moment, I left the drive with someone from my college who does data recovery "as a hobby". We'll see.

Thanks for all your replies guys!!

Hal1

Spinrite great piece of software. Another program I used is HDD regenerator (linkage from tucows) saved me in the past recovered from unusable HDD's, its on that 'boot cd' I mentioned in previous post. It might take a few hours or longer to complete...