HDD recovery

[ArisVer]

From a family member I got one external 2.5 inch spinner. It's a Seagate
ST9500420 AS. I've been told it's full of pictures and there is no backup.

When I connect it on the computer (Windows 7), it asks me to format the drive. In Disk Management it shows as a "465.76 GB RAW Healthy (Primary Partition)".

What are the steps to recover whatever happened? Can I clone the disk and try to recover from the new disk?

Serious advices only please.

Edit. I will try a well known working external case tomorrow.

 

[Cerb]

Very first thing I'd go is try to clone an image onto a larger HDD, with gddrescue. Leave Windows alone.

Then, I'd clone that to another larger drive, for data testing.

Then, on that healthy drive, I'd see what Testdisk could do, if anything, to recover the partition table, and then work from there.

 

[ArisVer]

On my Linux box the disk does not show up. Tried by blkid, fdisk -l and parted -l. It uses USB 1.1 but I don't think that's a problem. Maybe I am missing something? My own 2.5 inch 250 GB external disk is listed.

I will update later after the external case check.


Edit. Update. Nothing wrong with the external case.

I will try cloning the disk with Easeus software and then use their recovery software and Testdisk for Windows since the disk is not showing in Linux.

 

[chemwiz]

Did you try Recova, from Piriform? It get the mft back from a formatted/damaged disk and it's free. https://www.piriform.com/recuva/features

 

[phis6]

You can try connecting the drive directly on to a PC to eliminate the possibilities of the external enclosure being the issue.

 

[Blain]

Try booting from a Knoppix Live CD to search the HD for files.

 

[ArisVer]

Did you try Recova, from Piriform? It get the mft back from a formatted/damaged disk and it's free. https://www.piriform.com/recuva/features

I did try Recuva and got one bunch of files back.
Edit. It is not listed in that page, but it has an option to "Restore folder structure", maybe that could be it, can you verify? Also a drawback of Recuva is that it needs an equal or greater size disk to save the files. I needed to clean 500 GB off my disk for 60 GB. /Edit.

You can try connecting the drive directly on to a PC to eliminate the possibilities of the external enclosure being the issue.

That is how I connected the disk finally because I had trouble with the USB connection that kept dropping or not connecting. Shows in the BIOS and in Windows.


Also tried Photorec and will compare the files. I think I got most of the stuff out and I'm waiting for a disk to try what Cerb suggested. Then I will try Testdisk to see if I can get the MBR back which seems to be the problem. If I cannot do that, I will format it and check it because I think the disk is still good.

What can Knoppix do? Isn't it just an OS?

Any other free recovery software that allows you to save the files it finds?

 

[greenhawk]

not a free program but I have had a lot of success with the following program.

But as with all data recovery, never write back to the drive until you give up on data recovery from it.

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

the free version will work for < 64K files, but it has the same detection process to say what the files are on the drive that it can see.

When I use it for recovery, the files it marks as good I take as is, but any other rating (ok/poor/bad ect) I restore to a second location and do a manual search through those. It restores the missing files by copying them to a different location. Personally, it is well worth the asking price as I have had too many drives fail just because of partition / allocation table screw ups.

edit: there might be a few free software programs around that might work for some issues, but then the restructuring of data storage is not something someone with a free weekend, the tech description and average programing skills can write.

 

[ArisVer]

I have tried to clone the disk from Windows with Acronis and Macrium, no luck. Linux could not see the disk and threw a bunch of errors reading the disk on boot (it was attached to a SATA card as the machine is old - PATA).

In Windows explorer was hanging and various recovery programs wouldn't even run, my computer was slowing down because of the disk.

Last thing I tried was let chkdsk to run on boot, as I used to skip this part. It was all that was needed. The disk returned to normal. For comparison, I recovered 19635 files and 91 folders, and the disk is showing 19717 files and 91 folders.

Attached picture of the disk before it got fixed.