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Will Software recover this HDD?

J

Jawo

Diamond Member
My Parents HDD died, without a backup of course. I tried to connect it to my laptop, and the drive spins up, but windows doesn't recognize it. I then run chdsk on it and it get to ~40% before stopping. Would like to get the data back (pictures, taxes, etc), but don't want to spend more than $500. Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
Your best bet would be to look for a Knoppix live cd image on the net. Burn it to a disk, and then boot a computer up with the hard drive attatched. I have been able to recover pictures and other data without problem using the knoppix disc even when the hard drive is in total failure. You will have to have another option to where you can copy the files to though.. For ex.. a usb hard drive, another hard drive, or a network drive.
 
Hmm, interesting idea. Does anyone have any other suggestions? Would recovery software work?
 
For the future, consider spending that $500 on a Windows Home Server, that will automatically make ongoing backups of every computer connected to your network. You can restore your PC to its previous state quickly and with no in-depth computing skill.

If you can actually run CHKDSK on the drive, then it's likely that a software-based recovery program should be able to pull many files off the hard drive. The only software I've used recently for this purpose is one suggested earlier: GetDataBack at http://runtime.org. I'm sure that there are other usable programs, too.
 
yea getdataback might work. it will try to recover the parts of the drive it can read.
your parents didn't heed the advice to backup eh?
get them a mac with time machine😛
i swear that kinda consumer friendly backup shoulda been standard long ago.. on a second internal drive.
but consumers are too stupid and cheap for their own good for that to have worked.

i'm not sure about knoppix. the point of that is to boot the cd/dvd os so you can read off the drive. but if the drive is slightly scrambled knoppix will probably freak out and won't be able to see the contents or not be able to recover much. actual recovery software tries much harder to recover data most o/s's can't see. i remember one of my drives going bonkers, windows would just tell me to format the "blank" disk, the recovery software could after a long period of scanning the drive recovery a decent bit of stuff. maybe knoppix has recovery stuff now, its been a while since i downloaded that distro😛 course just because a recovery software can force read some stuff doesn't mean it will be perfect. some of my pictures were slightly corrupt and stuff.
 
I got a SATA drive from a friend that was failing to boot to windows. yesterday I was able to read some of the drive using norton ghost 12 but today I can't read anything. It seems like there are so many unreadible sectors. I've never seen a drive this bad off before.

I tried getdataback and spinrite. Both have issues reading the drive almost immediately. I hate to tell him the bad news but I don't know what else to try.
 
I have tried SpinRite and GetDataBack. SpinRite wasn't that speedy, but didn't fully recover anything. I was running it on an older machine so it was taking forever for an 80GB drive too (20 day ETA)!

GetDataBack continues to throw error 32 throughout the process. Additionally it freezes my system, forcing a restart. It is discovering files when it works though. I know my main rig is old (summer 2005), but this is wierd.

Might try the Linux distro next....but not too much experience in that arena.
 
Yup, if it's fixable by software, SpinRite should be able to fix it (except for any truly damaged sectors and you will be told what file the bad sector is part of. Did you try the drive testing program from the drive's mfr? That may clue you in as to what the problem is.

Everyone reading this thread: Backing up at least your important data IS NOT an option! Let this serve as an object lesson. Large Hard Drives are cheap these days and make backing up very fast, so there's no excuse.

.bh.
 
Well I tried the drive on my PVR machine (PIII, 512MB Ram), which worked! I was able to recover most everything from the drive, and it only took about 8 hours (ran overnight) for the program to recover everything. This is after SpinRite analyzed the drive for 24 hours and nothing but "Unrecoverable" red blocks!

Thanks to all and remember to tell your entire family to create backups! I do myself...but just never bought the drives for family, and they didn't back it up 🙁
 
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