Hard Drive Recovery Question

knuck

OK, if anyone could give me a solution to this problem I would be eternally grateful. It seems like there should be a really straigtforward solution, but for the life of me I can't figure it out. Or could anyone even suggest a good PC orientated support forum to post this query in.

I'll start with a little background. I had a 500G Maxtor hard-drive with windows XP installed on a 120G partition with DATA (pictures, movies, music, etc) on the remaining 380g partition. This installation of windows started playing up - crashing and bsod. Upon running a few checks it transpired that the hard-drive had bad sectors. I then installed a fresh windows XP on an old 120G hard-drive and booted into that (still had access to the two partitions on the 500g HDD). However the bad sectors would still cause the second installation of XP to crash also now and again.

Now is where the real problem starts - I decided to try a full format on the 120G partition with the bad sectors as I read that it can isolate them and mark them as bad. However I did this before I backed up the data from the other partition (I know!). Now that HDD is completely inaccessible through windows. When i plug the sata cable in the cpu goes to maximum usage as, i presume, it searchs for the MBR which is not there or corrupt due to the bad sectors. Eventually the two drives come up in My Computer but if I try to access the 120g it is inaccessible and if I try to access the 380G it says that it is not formatted. Windows, or windows based recovery programs seem to really dislike what I have done to my HDD!!

However. I then boot into Hirens Boot CD - Active File Recovery, Winternals Disk Commander, TestDisk, etc. Using each of these programs I can instantly see the 380G partition and all the folders/files are fully intact (why is this when windows has such difficulty with the HDD??). However, when I try to copy the files onto my good 120G HDD it is not listed as a destination drive in any of the different programs. The only drives listed are floppy, CD drive and the 100MB temp drive.

So the obvious way to fix this is to get the DOS based programs to see my good HDD as a destination location for copying files. Does anyone know why they don't, or how I can get them to recognize this HDD?

Does anyone know any other possible solutions through windows based programs?? If I can get access to the files/folders through windows I can easily copy them to the good HDD.

Sorry for the long post, and convoluted explanation. Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

blubloblu

Is the new drive formatted?
If it is, maybe it's NTFS and your tools can't read it.

gamer

See www.ntfs.com if you get the activeboot disdemo make a bootcd THEN YOU can use it 2copy folders if the drive is in ntfs format or fat32 format.
It loads a mini version of vista os from the cdr with mouse drivers and standard drivers installed..

knuck

blubloblu wrote: »

Is the new drive formatted?
If it is, maybe it's NTFS and your tools can't read it.

All of the hard drives involved are ntfs I believe. Would the the the dos based tools not recognize ntfs based partitions?

knuck

gamer wrote: »

See www.ntfs.com if you get the activeboot disdemo make a bootcd THEN YOU can use it 2copy folders if the drive is in ntfs format or fat32 format.
It loads a mini version of vista os from the cdr with mouse drivers and standard drivers installed..

Thanks. I'll have a look at this now and let you know how I get on.

vibe666

i had a similar problem with a 1tb drive a few weeks ago, (accidentally overwrote an ntfs partition with ext3 linux partition) and had bought a second 1tb drive with the intention of reovering everything using pro recovery tools that I have access to, but 2 different tools failed to recover anything worthwhile and another one only recovered about 25gb (out of >900gb) to the new drive.

A friend suggested a freeware tool called testdisk might do the job for me.

I tried it and not only did it take half the time any of those (allegedly) pro tools did, but it was able to actually restore the deleted partition on the same drive (negating the need for the new drive) by recovering a backup ntfs partition table and re-writing that over the top of the primary partition table.

one reboot later and the drive was back to normal with all the data intact.

anyway, it's well worth a go as everything else I tried required an extra blank disk to copy everything over to, but this one didn't.

good luck!

oh, and if it works for you, send a quick PM to a user called djr to say thanks as it was him who recommended it to me.

knuck

vibe666 wrote: »

i had a similar problem with a 1tb drive a few weeks ago, (accidentally overwrote an ntfs partition with ext3 linux partition) and had bought a second 1tb drive with the intention of reovering everything using pro recovery tools that I have access to, but 2 different tools failed to recover anything worthwhile and another one only recovered about 25gb (out of >900gb) to the new drive.

A friend suggested a freeware tool called testdisk might do the job for me.

I tried it and not only did it take half the time any of those (allegedly) pro tools did, but it was able to actually restore the deleted partition on the same drive (negating the need for the new drive) by recovering a backup ntfs partition table and re-writing that over the top of the primary partition table.

one reboot later and the drive was back to normal with all the data intact.

anyway, it's well worth a go as everything else I tried required an extra blank disk to copy everything over to, but this one didn't.

good luck!

oh, and if it works for you, send a quick PM to a user called djr to say thanks as it was him who recommended it to me.

I've tried TestDisk in DOS as well, and its a great little program. It finds the partitions and the data instantly but I cant get it to properly rewrite the MBR and old partition table. I think this is because the bad sectors are at the location on the primary partition that this data would normally be stored. I think my best bet is to copy the data onto another hard drive somehow and then trying to force zero to whole hard drive or send it back to Seagate.

Cheers for the advice though!

knuck

Gamer,

I tried the Active Boot Disk (Win) and I cant get it to boot up. I get a generic error message: "An unexpected I/O error has occurred.... 0xc00000e9". This is apparently a common error with a multitude of possible causes/solutions that I haven't been able to isolate yet. It is not to do with my bad HDD as I also get this message when it is not plugged in.

However I also tried the DOS version which worked fine. There is a tool in the called NTFS reader which also see's the data on the partition but then clearly states that it can only copy to FAT or network drives. So this explains why the DOS based tools above would not list my 'good' HDD as a destination drive as it is also NTFS. So I guess an obvious solution is to get a HDD and format in FAT and I should be able to copy the data easily onto this.

gamer

TO use the bootcd go to bios and set boot order cd =o, 1st drive is cd romdvd,
drive 1 =hd.AND write another cd image, a cdr is ony 20cents,MOST progs i see,for emergency boot cds , can read but cant write to ntfs.GET A NEW HD format it in fat32 hds are very cheap .IMGBURN IS the best 4 writing cd images eg isos ,set burn speed to 2x.ITS a free program.When using bootcds i burn it at a low rate 2 or 4x.DO not touch the drive pcb,theres a risk of static damage.Theres EBCD AND ultimate bootcd also but they dont have a full graphic interface gui with drag and drop file copying like activebootcd.

Amalgam

Doesn't an Ubuntu liveCD allow reading and writing to NTFS now?

knuck

gamer wrote: »

TO use the bootcd go to bios and set boot order cd =o, 1st drive is cd romdvd,
drive 1 =hd.AND write another cd image, a cdr is ony 20cents,MOST progs i see,for emergency boot cds , can read but cant write to ntfs.GET A NEW HD format it in fat32 hds are very cheap .IMGBURN IS the best 4 writing cd images eg isos ,set burn speed to 2x.ITS a free program.When using bootcds i burn it at a low rate 2 or 4x.DO not touch the drive pcb,theres a risk of static damage.Theres EBCD AND ultimate bootcd also but they dont have a full graphic interface gui with drag and drop file copying like activebootcd.

I have the Boot Disk burned to CD alright, and it initialize's the boot process. However at about 5% into the 'loading Windows screen' the error message pops up. Something along the lines of: "Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer.. which may be caused by...." At the monet the fat32 HDD option is looking like my best bet. thanks again

knuck

Amalgam wrote: »

Doesn't an Ubuntu liveCD allow reading and writing to NTFS now?

I'll have a look at that now. thanks

JDxtra

When you seen bad sectors, you should have copied your data elsewhere. Formatting the OS partition may have sent the drive over the edge as it was on its way out.

darconio

If you can access the hard drive within windows, Ontrack Easy Recovery is the best available solution.
Another option would be to boot your pc with Hiren's boot CD, start partition magic and hopefully it will detect a malformed MBR and fix it automatically.
If that doesn't happen you could try any of the other tools included in the above boot cd