As you may recall, two years ago, my hard drive crashed and I lost some vacation pictures that I had not backed up. I took it to a shop, the guy was able to pull some stuff off of it, but not the pictures (cost me about $50). Of what he could recover, some of the folders were empty and some files corrupted. What is interesting is that the folder that I really wanted is not even on the CD that he made.

I will spare you the details, but the HD is back in my possesion. I feel that I know a lot more now than I knew then, and am ready to try to recover the data myself.

From what I can gather, the partition table is messed up. I cannot get any OS to recognize the drive (Windows, Linux). I am able to run diagnostic programs, which of course show errors on the drive.

Today I tried a couple of programs from [emailprotected] - NTFS Reader and Partition Recovery (DEMO version). I was able to use Partion Recovery to CREATE a temporary partition and actually browse (text only) to the folder i want to recover. The files appear to still be there, and the file sizes make sense as well.

Here is the bummer...the demo does not permanently fix the broken partition. The full program is $30. If i repair the partition, I THINK i can use the NTFS Reader program to get the files (maybe). Or could I use an OS at that point?

I have no idea what I am doing. I am willing to pay $30 IF it works.

Where do I go from here?

PKIf i repair the partition, I THINK i can use the NTFS Reader program to get the files (maybe). Or could I use an OS at that point?

From the extracted quote above I assume the file system is NTFS. Another Dos-type program I have found very useful is NTFS4Dos, (from here), very like ReadNTFS but with turbo, might be worth a try.

Please POST back with your results.

Thanks

SUCCESS!!!!

Last evening I put the bad drive in as a slave in one of my older XP machines. I ran the free program PC Inspector and stumbled through the process. I did not find the program to be particularly easy to use, but once I figured out the best way to do things, I was able to ACCESS my files and pull what I thought to be 90% of my lost pictures onto the other HDD access them. It took me about 4 hours total.

This program takes a long time to scan, there is no preview for photos, and every file you pull is renamed "cluster" followed by a long number. It is also odd that all of my pics had the same file size - 1.43 mb. At any rate, I was on Cloud 9 today.

Though I could not recall what pictures, if any, were missing (it has been two years, remember), I would have sworn I got 90% of them.

Well, when I got home today I decided to try VirtualLab Data Recovery and just see what it's like. What a GREAT program! That is the way data recovery software should work. It was MUCH faster and after it rebuilt a temporary file system, I could access my folders and files nearly as they appeared on the drive. I could even preview my pictures!! Then, after you confirm the data is there and worth salvaging, you pay for a space "quota" to pull the data from the bad drive. $40 for 100 mb. I am glad that I was able to get some via the free method, or else 100 mb would not have been enough. It turns out that I only got about 60% the first time. This program took like 30 minutes.

I am pretty sure I got them all now.

So I think next I will try TestDisk, which is another free program recommended. I am curious to see if would have been successful with it. Now that I have my data, I really don't care what happens to this drive.

Which brings me to my next questions: Is this disk repairable and reusable? What do I need to do to it and what kind of scans should I do to make sure that it is trustworthy?

PK
Great to hear you got your data back...40 bucks for 100G sounds a bit steep but hey it worked and only the owner of something can determine it's value...

As to the drive i recommend visiting the manuf. site and using their free diagnostics on it to see if the drive can be trusted with further data...this is the most reliable method.

Again Congrats !Well, for kicks I tried a free program called TestDisk (the Windows version since I still had the bad drive hooked up as a slave in a Windows machine). Within 10 minutes from start to finish, I had my desired data copied over to the Windows drive. Its a text based, DOS like program, but is fairly easy to navigate and use. I do not know how it did it, but it was pretty amazing.

The only wierd thing is that the root folder listing stopped at the "M"s even though the other programs showed folders beyond that. It was no big deal to me, as my stuff was in "Documents and Settings."

Even though I was able to get all of my pics for free using TestDisk, I do not regret paying the $40 for the Virtual Labs program. I just wanted the data recovery portion of this experience to be OVER I wanted my pictures, and since I could actually SEE them, I jumped at it. It was a good learning experience too.

OK, on to the bad drive. I ran SeaTools. Maxtor is now owned by Seagate, so my search for Maxtor tools led me there. I have used MaxBlast and it did not have the options that SeaTools does. After running a long scan, I found 57 bad sectors, including Sector 0. I ran the repair tool and it says that it fixed all of the bad sectors. Now what do I do? Do I do a zero fill and rescan?

It also said that the Temp was 253 degrees, or had reached that temp at some time, which does not seem likely.

Again, how do I know that this drive is trustworthy? I would probably use it to store my iTunes library, and maybe some video captures, both of which would also backed up on an external. I would just rather not even mess with it if it is going to crash again soon.

PK
A zero fill and re-scan is exactly what to do next...
Also if you DLoad and burn the UBCD (ultimate boot CD ) you will find the Seatools on there as well as some excellent diagnostic and troubleshooting apps. He has collected them over the years and it's a CD that's saved my bacon more times than i could count.

As long as you are doing regular backups to the external i would have no problem re-using that drive...

But what are you using to backup the external ? ?

All HDD's FAIL. I highly recommend Acronis True Image as a backup utility...version 9 is available right now for 20 bucks shipped...i'd hold off on ver. 10 for now as some people are having issues but from what i've read these are mostly in a server enviornment.

Here YA Go...Heh, UBCD is exactly what I use. What a great tool!

OK, so i will zero fill, then run a few more diagnostics, then go ahead and reuse??

I use MS SyncToy. It may not be the best, but its free, and i am new to this external drive thing. I figure as long as my important files get to a second location, then that is sufficient.

I do, however, need to look into an off site solution.

PK