Data recovery from a failed hard drive. Any hope?

TheBoyConor

Hi,

So I was given a laptop by a friend of a friend to repair as it was functioning slow and erraticly shutting down.

It booted up and worked but there were hard drive noises. Then it died and refused to boot any more.

I installed a new SSD and installed windows 10 and now the laptop is fine.

However, I've been trying to recover the documents and pictures on the old drive for the owner. No success yet. When I connect in a caddy it is showing up in explorer as "Local Disk E" but I can't access it, explorer freezes up.
The disk is spinning and I can hear the head clicking back and forth.

I've tried using iMyFone Anyrecover and some other similar utility. Both have not worked and have either not detected the hard drive or freezed up when the disk is connected requiring CTRL ALT DEL to get the computer unfroze.

Have any of you ever been in a similar situation?
Is there any other things that I could try to recover at least some of the files on the disk?
I want to do everything i can to get this persons files back for them.

shanec1928

how valuable is the data? if valuable pay a data recovery specialist. it wont be cheap though

crashplan

Sounds like the disk is cattle trucked. Potentially the only way to recover the data is with a company like https://www.datarecovery.ie/contact/.

Used them before and they got all the data back but it cost about €400 + the price of an external ssd.

TheBoyConor

mother of god, that is a wicked price.

The data is more of personal value, rather than valuable. Photos of family and friends, previous college projects etc.

Is there any other thing I can try or any cheaper alternative?

Slippin Jimmy

Unfortunately not. The suggestions above are the best way to retrieve the data. Going forward I would recommend backing your data up to the cloud.

squawker

Freezer trick

I have done it on a few old drives manufactured around 04-08, had success on 2 of these drives from about 6

It's pretty much a hail mary if every other option is exhausted, if the drive is 8-10 years old it might be worth a shot

Drives newer than 8 years old this trick will completely feck them though

ItHurtsWhenIP

I've heard great things about SpinRite.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

$89 for a license. No guarantee, but it might be worth the risk.

shanec1928

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

I've heard great things about SpinRite.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

$89 for a license. No guarantee, but it might be worth the risk.

Just as a fyi this can sometimes end up causing more damage to the drive.

Mrcaramelchoc

crashplan wrote: »

Sounds like the disk is cattle trucked. Potentially the only way to recover the data is with a company like https://www.datarecovery.ie/contact/.

Used them before and they got all the data back but it cost about €400 + the price of an external ssd.

I don't get it.what do they use that an ordinary person couldn't.is it a piece of expensive electronics?or do you need a degree in forensic science ?id love to hear what it is.

TheBoyConor

Its not the how or what they use. It's they why.

This is what they can get away with charging if someone or a business wants to recover valuable data. You could look upon it as being the average value their customers place on the data that they need.

shanec1928

Mrcaramelchoc wrote: »

I don't get it.what do they use that an ordinary person couldn't.is it a piece of expensive electronics?or do you need a degree in forensic science ?id love to hear what it is.

Do you have a clean room in your home?to take apart a drive to manually rebuild it in certain circumstances.some of the programs listed above are about what a joe soap with a bit of knowledge could give a lash at.

Mrcaramelchoc

shanec1928 wrote: »

Do you have a clean room in your home?to take apart a drive to manually rebuild it in certain circumstances.some of the programs listed above are about what a joe soap with a bit of knowledge could give a lash at.

Oh i get that its intricate and complicated i was just wondering what's actually involved.i guess i could Google it

enniscorthy

Mate 400 squid sound reasonable enough

FishOnABike

Mrcaramelchoc wrote: »

I don't get it.what do they use that an ordinary person couldn't.is it a piece of expensive electronics?or do you need a degree in forensic science ?id love to hear what it is.

It can be anything from using relatively simple (and some not so simple) recovery software to repairing or replacing a failed controller board or even physically disassembling the drive heads and platters and rebuilding them in cleanroom conditions. It depends on what has caused the drive failure.

leinster93

If you insert the drive into a disk caddy you could mount the drive. Th
Explanation here...this has worked for me in the past

https://youtu.be/xohlhpBTkcY

davyboy1975

Have you tried using a linux program to read the drive rather then windows?

TheBoyConor

No, explain using a Linux program to me...


And no I haven't tried mounting the drive. I figured it would do this automatically? Any other drives put in the caddy work perfectly.
I'll give it a go though.

davyboy1975

TheBoyConor wrote: »

No, explain using a Linux program to me...


And no I haven't tried mounting the drive. I figured it would do this automatically? Any other drives put in the caddy work perfectly.
I'll give it a go though.

Download parted magic burn it to dvd and run it on ur pc. Connect up the hard drive as normal and it should be able to read it and get info off it if it's recoverable at all

Johnboy1951

Stop messing with the drive, as you are most likely causing more damage.

Get someone who knows what they are doing to try to clone the contents of the drive to another similar sized HDD.

Then do the recovery of data from the cloned copy.

TheBoyConor

This is what I am afraid of, doing more damage.

I'm not really inclined to pay someone big money to clone the disk though. What steps would you recommend to clone the disk to another good disk and recover from that. What cloning software might work?

Johnboy1951

TheBoyConor wrote: »

This is what I am afraid of, doing more damage.

I'm not really inclined to pay someone big money to clone the disk though. What steps would you recommend to clone the disk to another good disk and recover from that. What cloning software might work?

I would attempt a bit by bit copy of the contents, probably using one or mopre of
dd
dclfdd
ddrescue
dd_rescue
and
testdisk
photorec
and probably others to recover the data from the cloned copy.

There is no guarantee anything will work, but you can be fairly sure you are not helping by powering up this drive without being prepared to clone it.

Johnboy1951

crashplan wrote: »

Sounds like the disk is cattle trucked. Potentially the only way to recover the data is with a company like https://www.datarecovery.ie/contact/.

Used them before and they got all the data back but it cost about €400 + the price of an external ssd.

Mrcaramelchoc wrote: »

I don't get it.what do they use that an ordinary person couldn't.is it a piece of expensive electronics?or do you need a degree in forensic science ?id love to hear what it is.

It depends on the problem.
Most drives are likely physically and electrically good, it is just access is corrupted.
In that situation recovery of data is fairly simple, provided of course none of it has been overwritten by someone trying things they know little or nothing about.

Where it becomes very costly is when the drive has physically or electrically failed.
This often manifests itself in constant 'clicking' as the drive head flies over and back hitting its end stop.
That requires the drive to be taken apart, which requires a clean room.
The platter can be extracted, and if not seriously damaged by the flying head tearing across its surface, and the data read from it.
That data then has to be reconstructed so that information can be extracted from it.
It gets very involved, requiring high expertise, and means high costs, all without any guarantee of success.

There are a lot of myths and folklore about recovering data that is just plain BS.
It is relatively easy if it is just filesystem or drive structure corruption that has occurred.
It is impossible if the drive has been blanked by a single write of the complete surface.

It is hugely costly if the drive has not been blanked, there is hardware failure and the drive has to be disassembled.

olestoepoke

I deleted a family video. On a Mac, accidentally put it in the thrash and deleted the thrash a few weeks later. The laptop has since been broken and I took the HD out before I got rid. Is there a way to retrieve the video?
I used a recovery software and it worked, problem is that it retrieved everything and nothing was named. I spent a few days going through the recovered data but gave up as there was too much data and would've taken months

Johnboy1951

olestoepoke wrote: »

I deleted a family video. On a Mac, accidentally put it in the thrash and deleted the thrash a few weeks later. The laptop has since been broken and I took the HD out before I got rid. Is there a way to retrieve the video?
I used a recovery software and it worked, problem is that it retrieved everything and nothing was named. I spent a few days going through the recovered data but gave up as there was too much data and would've taken months

Some recovery software can recover the file names for the recovered files, IF that information is intact.
So not a question that is easily answered.

Some software can identify the type of file .... movie, picture etc so the recovered files can be sorted by type and that should provide a smaller list to search through.

olestoepoke

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

Some recovery software can recover the file names for the recovered files, IF that information is intact.
So not a question that is easily answered.

Some software can identify the type of file .... movie, picture etc so the recovered files can be sorted by type and that should provide a smaller list to search through.

Could you recommend one? How much would it cost to leave it with a professional? I'ts a 5 min video,

TheBoyConor

I've come across this tool. It is fairly simple and straightforward. Do you think it might be suitable? Are there any others you would recommend.

https://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

Owner has been told that the disk is stone dead and data is gone. They accept this. At this stage it is more of a personal challenge experiment to see if I can recover anything. If I do, it'll just be an unexpected and welcome bonus for the owner.

Johnboy1951

olestoepoke wrote: »

Could you recommend one? How much would it cost to leave it with a professional? I'ts a 5 min video,

I would advise you contact the company linked in this thread or another like it, and provide whatever info they require to give you an estimate of cost.

I have no connection with any company in this or a related business.

arleitiss

Get adapter for hard drive to connect it to USB.

Get EaseUS or Recuva.
Enable Deep Scanning.
Leave it for day or two (it will take a while).

Allocate day or few to go through all recovered stuff, I've done this plenty of times and at all times I was able to recover it (Except that one time I stuck hard drive into a freezer)

Be prepared to discover files that you didn't even know you had previously, it can sometimes recover files even those deleted few years ago by another user/owner.

Zulu

If it mounts, try FTK Imager to image the disk contents....

TheBoyConor

Not interested in paying for anything or any service. This is a DIY challenge effort. If I cannot recover myself free of change, it'll go in the bin. Or I'll open it up to see if there's any visible damage. And I'll probably dismantle it.

Johnboy1951

TheBoyConor wrote: »

I've come across this tool. It is fairly simple and straightforward. Do you think it might be suitable? Are there any others you would recommend.

https://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

Owner has been told that the disk is stone dead and data is gone. They accept this. At this stage it is more of a personal challenge experiment to see if I can recover anything. If I do, it'll just be an unexpected and welcome bonus for the owner.

Given the info provided - that it is for personal education and maybe a nice surprise for someone you know if successful - then that would appear to be sufficient for your needs.
I would suggest the first thing should be a 'raw' copy to an alternate drive, and from that point on do not access the problem drive at all, but use the cloned drive.
It will all depend on whether you can clone it or not.

More ideal would be to do a 'raw' copy in digital form, and use that to write a clone.
If you corrupt the clone you can always start again from the digital copy, without the need to access the problem drive.

Good luck

TheBoyConor

I have a 500Gb drive in my PC that is redundant since I installed my SSD. I could format and partition that into two 250Gb drives and then image the problem drive onto one partition and put the working clone for recover into the other partition.

I think a hurdle will be getting the problem drive to mount or be recognized by the PC without freezing up. Several recover tools like recuva and anyrecover that I've tried so far just freeze up. I'll try a few methods to mount the drive.

arleitiss

TheBoyConor wrote: »

I have a 500Gb drive in my PC that is redundant since I installed my SSD. I could format and partition that into two 250Gb drives and then image the problem drive onto one partition and put the working clone for recover into the other partition.

I think a hurdle will be getting the problem drive to mount or be recognized by the PC without freezing up. Several recover tools like recuva and anyrecover that I've tried so far just freeze up. I'll try a few methods to mount the drive.

I had similar issue before as well.
I got cheap 15 euro drive docker/cloner from amazon and cloned entire damaged drive onto blank hard drive as those things don't really care if data is readable or not.

I know you want to clone it to partition, just putting that as an option out there.

TheBoyConor

I have a SATA external HDD enclosure that I use as a dock. it connects to PC through USB. If I cannot clone or mount through that I might give it a try by connecting to the internal SATA sockets.

Failing that I might try one of those standalone clone machines. A cheap one got off of ebay or amazon would do me. Could you recommend one? More importantly, did it work when you tried it?

Ten Pin

Puppy Linux (and other versions of Linux) can boot off a USB flash drive independently of the laptop hard drive. Then see if anything shows up on the 'faulty' drive.


http://puppylinux.com/

my3cents

Try the device connected to whatever you like it probably won't make any difference. If its recognised at start and you've nothing to loose then I'd heat the **** out of it with a hair drier then plug it in with some software ready running that will do a sector by sector clone.

The hair drier might get it going (long time since I've done that but it does work sometimes) long enough to get the cloning started and the sector by sector cloning shouldn't have the heads moving too much which might also help. If the hair drier trick is working then keep it played on the drive to keep it good and hot (you should still be able to hold it) .

Johnboy1951

TheBoyConor wrote: »

I have a 500Gb drive in my PC that is redundant since I installed my SSD. I could format and partition that into two 250Gb drives and then image the problem drive onto one partition and put the working clone for recover into the other partition.

I think a hurdle will be getting the problem drive to mount or be recognized by the PC without freezing up. Several recover tools like recuva and anyrecover that I've tried so far just freeze up. I'll try a few methods to mount the drive.

You seem to misunderstand what a clone and bit by bit copy is.

Forget about partitions or anything else on the clone target drive.
You need to make a duplicate of the problem drive which means ALL of it, including partition structure etc etc.

Tiy easiest method would be using a live Linux running from USB and then use the 'dd' command to read the problem drive and write what it reads to the target clone drive.

If that succeeds then you have a chance to recover data from the clone.

TheBoyConor

Tried many of the above but nothing worked. Turns out the lady has a lot of the stuff actually backed up as it turns out.

So I opened it up while running and rammed my screwdriver onto the platter. Sparks flew and everything. lols