So, I have this hard drive from about a year ago that died on me. I left it for about a year and I decided to come back to it. It's a 1TB drive (It was in an external case, WD) that had about 7 years of archived TV and Films that I've downloaded. In other words, it's something that's important to me, but not important enough to bother paying for data recovery. My issue was that the drive wouldn't appear in windows any further than being installed. It'd install the device, but nothing in my computer, nothing in disk manager, I could only ever see the drive in device manager. So I bought a new board for the bottom of it, an identical one, and replaced it. I got a bit further this time, with the PC then asking me to initialise it, which it wouldn't do, saying there was an I/O error. When looking at the drive in my data recovery program, it said the only available partition was 0.5kB in size with nothing in it. I figured I'd try the next thing on my list and that was freezing it. That hasn't gone so well, because I don't get jackshit from my PC on it now, except that it found a device. It doesn't even show in device manager now. I guess it might be fixed when it heats back up to room temperature again. It's also worth noting that in my desperation, I committed the cardinal hard drive sin. I did the unthinkable. I opened it. I have a fairly decent knowledge of taking hard drives to bits (albeit I've never taken one to pieces with the intention of it ever working again). I just popped the cover slightly open so I could see if there was a mechanical issue. It does seem like the heads are clicking, but not your regular "click of death" where they scrape across the platter surface scratching everything. They're being stopped by something on the spindle I think, which is stopping them go further. But at the same time, once I put the cover back on, this stopped, and it only started again after I plugged it in from being frozen. So I think this should go away. I hope. In short, I'm asking if anyone around here has experience with this kind of stuff. DIY Hard drive recovery is no small task, so any ideas or past experiences could be really helpful in trying to fix this. I know that paying for a data recovery service could be cheaper, and realistically, probably only double the price I paid for the new board in the first place, but I don't mind learning from this in the process, and I really enjoy taking things to bits and fixing them.
I don't get why data recovery program would say bullshit about partition table other than 1st sector being damaged/overwritten. Anyway, I'd just copy every single byte out of broken hard drive and deal with problems like "partitions" later. BTW once you opened whole thing it could have fucked up because heads won't stay at correct distance from platters. MAJOR MISTAKE: not copying blindly every byte to some other shit when you could have tried. BTW2 I can't remember how many times I overwrote MBR with garbage and had to do crazy stuff to restore it. Most of it 5-10 years ago and father was pissed off like hell because important data was on it, I always managed to restore things. :>
Ugh, data recovery. You could try booting into a LiveCD or LiveUSB of Linux to see if it can detect something that Windows doesn't. You could also possibly use Clonezilla to copy off the data, though it could be permanently wrecked because you opened it; a slight offset or a speck of dust might've fucked it up already. CloneZilla is what I use when I need to copy shit off a hard drive that I can't directly access. I had a laptop a few months back that got a short on the Northbridge chip so it was entirely fucked. I took the hard drive, swapped it into another laptop and used CloneZilla to make an image file. Then, on my desktop, installed XP onto a partition in a virtual machine using VirtualBox, booted the virtual machine with Clonezilla to image a second partition with the image file of the hard drive, and was able to access the files. So if it's not entirely fucked and the data is still accessible, you could try putting the hard drive directly into your computer and cloning it from there. Or you could clone it straight from the external, whatever works for you.
Ultimate Boot CD This basically contains every free hard drive diagnostic/recovery program ever made.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm You can't go wrong with spinrite ever. Also, a search for "Hiren's Boot DVD 15.0 Restored Edition V 2.0" yields another powerful product that will have any utility you'd ever need quite possibly.
Disk recovery ain't that expensive these days and can be done on a no fix no fee. Sometimes it is worth sending it along to these guys to be appraised even if you have no intention of going through with the work as they will open it in a controlled environment and have stock of the necessary parts if internals need to be replaced. They basically get it to the point where they can image the disk then ask you if you want to go through with the work.So you can send the disk off, have them do the hard work and when they quote you just say "how fuggin much? I don't need the data that bad. Bollox to it - just send my disk back" and for the price of postage you often get back a drive that spins and can be imaged even if the filesystem/data is corrupted (which you can then deal with using software or a hex editor or whatever) There is never any point in opening a disk unless you are swapping the platters into like for like hardware which is still an option for you. If there is a mechanical issue then exposing the drive to hot/cold can help massage the internals back to life. Sounds stupid but the freezer and the oven has saved a couple of disks for me. SpinRite is very cheap software that is basically an advanced chkdsk and I once had to run it for a week but did get data off the drive which was a bit clicky. Whatever you do you should NEVER EVER EVER EVER alter data on the disk itself. Get it to the point where you can read bits off the drive (doesn't need to mount the file system) and image it. Work on the image. So many times I've seen people run software on drives that destroys any chance of recovering anything when the problem was something simple that could have been fixed easily.
cheap software at $90 for something that may not work? Granted it may be cheaper then sending it to get it recovered but, cheap it is not.
Its not his porn collection otherwise he would have gone for the data recovery. He might have even gotten a discount since they would obviously make a copy for themselves.
I saw it floating about for £100. I spent like £43 on the board, but idk, maybe I feel awkward because the TV, Films and Game ISOs are so clearly gotten illegitimately. It's not that I think I'd get in trouble, but it's still something I'd rather avoid if at all possible. As for imaging, I don't really know how I can go about that because it just won't be picked up. I can't find anything to image. I thought about the whole live CD shit, but Live CDs have never found anything that EASEUS couldn't find. Both Napalm and myself have been using EASEUS for years so we sort of built a trust for it, i.e. if it can't find it, nothing can. But I'll try the other stuff nonetheless. A-z-K, if you remember it, I'd appreciate it if you could PM me the company you used so I can take a look. Also no, there's no porn on it, I'm far too impatient to download my porn and save it.
Yeah I'll dig it out from my super organised mailbox! With the imaging - you'll be able to create a disk image if the volume mounts (i.e. you can see the disk in storage manager) even if the file system doesn't mount. If the file system is corrupt then testdisk is a good utility to detect previous settings and write a suitable replacement - but again, the key to data recovery is to work from an image of the disk and not the disk itself. Any changes to the disk are unfavourable as they limit options later. The disk should only be read from, not written to. Also I'd avoid using a USB caddy, etc and just direct connect to the mother board using SATA or whatever. If the volume isn't seen at all then either send away for data recovery who have the hardware to recover directly from the platters or swap them into like hardware, or alternatively buy exactly the same hard disk (same version number is important,research) and swap platters if you are confident doing it. Obviously try to make as much of a controlled environment as possible and make sure you invert it when you blow out any dust to prevent anything else settling
So, a bit of a bump on this. I finally got round to trying out spinrite. Spinrite is telling me it can't look at the partition because the size of the partition exceeds what it actually is. This makes no sense to me, but it's saying that as a result of this, the bios is blocking access to it. Any ideas? I figure that Hirens Partition Magic could maybe do something, but I'm not sure what. I'd rather ask before I go ahead, and this is mainly aimed at A-z-K.
Hey, my apologies - I forgot totally tbh. Just got back from holiday but I'm in the office tomorrow and I'll sort it out and come back to you
Thanks. Also, another Hard Drive I recovered, everything on it except what was left in the recycle bin seems to be unopenable, probably corrupt. Is there a program to check for file integrity or any shit like that? So I can just run it across the entire drive and see what's usable. I mainly care about knowing what WAS on it anyway, so I'm not majorly upset about it.
That's so? Im pretty sure that its exactly what you said back in the now-erased thread about torrents.
