recovering data from a bad harddrive

[cubby1223]

Alright, here's my troubles. Trying to see if I can pull anything off of a harddrive. First obstacle was that HP set up the laptop so that the user profile directories are inaccessible from other users. Lucky me.

I used ERD Commander to try and reset the permissions on the profile directory. Midway through resetting permissions, the drive ran into a bad sector, locked the system up.

Now, anytime I want to boot to _anything_, a full hard drive scan initiates without warning. I've tried hooking the drive to a good computer system on the secondary port, normal mode & safe mode both start a scan. I've put the drive in a usb enclosure, again once Windows finds the usb device it starts a scan. Recovery console, ERD Commander, they both start a scan without a chance to avoid it.

I'm going to try and see what I can do with Knoppix, though with the fine download times I've got a while to ponder finding solutions to get at the data on this drive. Plus I haven't used Knoppix before, I wouldn't know what to do.

Is this a hopeless cause? Basically, I'm in need of a tool that assumes the drive is bad before it attempts to do anything with it.

 

[saturnpappaa]

i've had a drive cause my pc to go into a scan with out asking me, if i recalled i did a google on "disabling scan disk win xp" something like that. Then i disable disk scanning in xp , and it allowed the os to boot. However if the drive is locking up the computer when being accessed i would say its hopeless

 

[cubby1223]

The drive is not in that bad of shape, just one of the lockups likely messed up something with the file system. But I cannot fix anything with the tools I currently have, they're attempting to repair the file system under the assumption that this is a purely software error.

 

[saturnpappaa]

before you hook the hard drive up to a good machine , disable the good machines scan disk feature, i'll look it up

 

[cubby1223]

If you can recall it, that would help me out a lot, I haven't found the magic google keywords to look it up yet.

 

[saturnpappaa]

I hope you mean windows won't stop scanning your drive : Disabling Chkdsk - Windows 2000 and XP

1. Run the Registry Editor (regedt32.exe)

2. Under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE subtree, go to the following subkey:

\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

3. Change the BootExecute entry to:

autocheck autochk *

Exit your registry, you may need to restart or log out of Windows for the change to take effect.

 

[saturnpappaa]

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1053838744 may be of some help , otherwise i would lookinto downloading and creating barts ultimate boot cd, that will allow you to access the drive and what not sort of like knoppix but with a windows interface http://www.ubcd4win.com/
good luck!

 

[cubby1223]

Thanks for the help. I was looking into the ultimate boot cd & BartPE. I tried the drive a few more times with the usb enclosure, and finally it got past the first check of the drive, and then Autoplay kicked in to scan the entire drive but I was able to cancel that. I was able to get into the profile directory (ERD Commander evidently got through enough of the directory resetting permissions so I could access it) and pull out everything I needed.

I'll chalk this one up to luck, and I'll take with me the experience to just use ERD Commander to copy files, not to write to the disk.