NO SARKY MS OR WINDOZE COMMENTS!

[Manator]

Get Data Bak.---------- Post Auto-Merged at 22:41 ---------- Previous post was made at 22:39 ----------

Data Recovery Software Products - Runtime Software Products

Used it many times with success (both NTFS and FAT). Not wishing to anger the Mod gods, but you may find a copy thats free if you know where to look .

P.S. Get a mac and use time machine.

A member in need deserves a PM:innocent

 

[steptoe]

sidewinder, as boatboy suggested, try Linux,

a few for you here, sorry I cant do links, Im a computer noob,

simply try a linux 'LIVE' CD and search your HDD , it may find your missing/corrupt files

boot a copy of UBUNTU from your CD drive and download 'PHOTOREC' , its commend line but pretty easy to suss, worked miracles for me, even after reformatting drives

is your HDD in FAT format ?

I really would'nt try any of Bills stuff, will/maybe/possibly overwrite/destroy what you are trying to recover as its all in the same format(FAT), LINUX works in EXT format(Apple I assume works different also)

try/use MAC or LINUX to recover it as you will be more positive as to it being taken out of FAT/NTFS rather than windows, although if it is inj NTFS you may have more problems getting it back.

 

[philbas]

Easeus Data Recovery is also very good, and works on disks that claim to need formating, the free version lets you recover upto 1 gig.

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

 

[steptoe]

SW: Nothing is difficult to back up if you know how :yellow card If you really must insist on using Bills useles OS with his inherintly useless disk management then at least get yourself a second hard drive (you probably have this) and i know that the horse has bolted :slap ROTFWL :slap

But download a lovely clone Open Source Program

Clonezilla - About

Its written by the linux boys and if you have tried any of the rubbish like Norton Ghost, Acronis etc that cost a fortune and are total rubbish then you will be enlightened cos it does what it says on the tin

500Gb clone made in under 15 minutes, sector by sector perfecto

Clonezilla - About

As for your existing HDD then if it doesnt show as a spare drive under windows then your stuffed, you can send it to one of those hdd recover places, cost will be

 

[Sidewinder]

Guys,

I did post this a.m. but I don't know what happened to it!

I have a linux distro on a "spare" disk for the laptop.

I have looked a bit more, the disk is spinning up, no clunking, it is recognised and is still partitioned.

The SMART data shows as OK.

It looks like a file system type issue!

I have d/l "SystemRescueCD" and burnt out to try.

Also Clonezilla.

I have previously bought an empty Raid1 NAS box that uses ext2 or another linux f/s, which I have put 2x250GB disks in, I may change these for bigger drives as the nas software is resident in the box, thus if a disk goes down or the box goes down then I can still access the data by connecting the disk up to another machine.

I also have a Buffalo Linkstation NAS which is 2x1TB configured as RAID1, but I am not sure what would happen if a disk or the box went faulty as far as the data goes.

Canoeboy,

Which RAID5 enclosure from the link you posted to you use?

Most of them seem to be RAID0/1?

Gonna give systemrescuecd a try now.

Whic are good easy to install / learn Linux distro's at the moment?

I prefer a GUI tbh.

Any suggestions?

 

[steptoe]

Deffo go for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS , Its my main use one and is very like windows, even the missus can use it fine, good GUI, and most stuff works out of the box,

Video messaging is awkward, and some printers are worthless(Epson to name one) .

 

[philbas]

Please try my suggestion, its non destructive, and it works

 

[Sidewinder]

philbas,

Just d/l now to try mate

 

[philbas]

If it can see your drive it ill gwt it back, sorry i dont have the full version but at aleast you can see if it works

 

[Sidewinder]

Canoe,

I did this and it worked previously!

I will look at my other options.

 

[a1]

Any luck Sidey? ray

 

[Sidewinder]

NOT YET!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Robojin]

Not always true, for instance one of the hard disk manufacturers (not maxtor and cant remember the make, IBM i think) use platters that are like rizlas and when there drive goes wonky the platters burn and fry, head then drives into them like an engraving machine, i sent 4 off for recovery at

 

[Sidewinder]

Please try my suggestion, its non destructive, and it works

philbas,

It won't work for me it has been searching for over 8hrs now no joy, just cancelled it.

Gutted!

Have had a quote of between

 

[steptoe]

Have you tried ubuntu and photorec? Or the other one canoe suggested with loads of recovery software built in.

Backtrack4 is another option but quite a bit of command line needed, it can be pretty forensic.

There is another deep scan one if I could remember its name, will look it up for you later.

 

[philbas]

philbas,It won't work for me it has been searching for over 8hrs now no joy, just cancelled it.

Gutted!

Have had a quote of between

 

[Sidewinder]

Gonna try one of the other windoze progs suggested, then its onto Linux!

Have d/l & burnt Ubuntu 10.04.2 & the System Rescue CD

Steps keep your phone handy mate!!!

Canoe, whats your mobile number buddy!

It's gonna be a long night!!!

Hope I can still get to Guinness if there's any left in his fridge after you lot!

 

[Robojin]

That's what I was told by a data recovery firm when I sent some hard disks back for recovery, they were ibms from memory, also sent some WDs back and the head had driven into the platters or so I was told, after a long chat with them at the time they recommended maxtors above other for better recovery when failed, how true that is I don't know.

Sounds like they were using a bit of poetic licence then ; \.

As a general point, all disc file systems have there pros & cons, it's the nature of the corruption that's relevant and what tools you have a your disposal. If I were being sarcastic Windoze and MAC OSX could be describe as Unix for dummies. However having the tools to recover data and having the knowledge to use them effectively is not the same, so moving to another OS because of this idea is not a sound strategy. irrespective of your favoured OS protecting your data against loss is far more important than a belief that one platform is better than the another. Remember hardware fails, S/W fails, and OS fail at some point, if you have a well thought out backup routine none of this will be of an issue irrespective of the type of failure and OS used.

Although Sidewinder's problem relates to a S/W solution that proved to be painful to backup, by asking if any had a solution he has also highlighted that data loss is a reality so if any of us are in a similar situation we can take steps to avoid it. I have lost a number of drives recently, fortunately the data loss was of little consequence just annoying.

A backup strategy might be:

1. A local backup to a USB HDD

2. A RAID 5 based NAS solution for all files

3. Sychronised data on Laptop and Desktop (Dropbox)

4. Cloud storage of critical files (Mozy, division of EMC)

1 & 2 may involve some outlay, 3 is free but the data duplicate in the cloud is not encrypted and 4 is relatively cheap and encrypted

Most if not all of the above are OS and platform agnostic

 

[steptoe]

parted magic is another,

the one I have used and had good results with is 'testdisk' , it is part of 'photorec', and although command line it is very simple,

TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks. It is very useful in recovering lost partitions. It works with :

DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP )
Linux Ext2 and Ext3
BeFS ( BeOS )
BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
CramFS (Compressed File System)
HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System
JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
Linux Raid
Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
Netware NSS
ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6
Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
XFS, SGI's Journaled File System
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks. It has been extended to search also for non audio/video headers. It searchs for
Sun/NeXT audio data (.au)
RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav)
BMP bitmap (.bmp)
bzip2 compressed data (.bz2)
Source code written in C (.c)
Canon Raw picture (.crw)
Canon catalog (.ctg)
FAT subdirectory
Microsoft Office Document (.doc)
Nikon dsc (.dsc)
HTML page (.html)
JPEG picture (.jpg)
MOV video (.mov)
MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3)
Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg)
Minolta Raw picture (.mrw)
Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf)
Portable Document Format (.pdf)
Perl script (.pl)
Portable Network Graphics (.png)
Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf)
Contax picture (.raw)
Rollei picture (.rdc)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Shell script (.sh)
Tar archive (.tar )
Tag Image File Format (.tiff)
Microsoft ASF (.wma)
Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f)
zip archive (.zip)

 

[Sidewinder]

OK,

Got Ubuntu 10.04.2 installed & up and running on a spare disk.

Eventually managed to find testdisk & install it easily really, then I had to run it!

Took me 5 mins to find out how!

Ran it found it easy to use then, and it found the disk connected via usb OK, & checked it OK, just found read errors on every sector!!!

Next plan, not sure...