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External Hard Drive recovery

Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
Okay, so despite the computer saying it was okay to disconnect the drive, I apparently have managed to fudge up my external drive that had a lot of old crap I kinda still want on it. Basically right now the drive shows up as being 0 bytes in size and accessing it gets me a "Drive is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable" error

After going through a ton of partition recovery programs, I finally found one that managed to see the files on the drive: DiskGetor. The only issue is I got cockblocked when I actually tried to recover the files and it asked me to register, and at $69 bucks, it's not quite worth that much to me.

Anyone know of a freeware program that can either fix the drive or recover the files?

Undead Scottsman on

Posts

  • corky842corky842 Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    PC Inspector File Recovery is freeware, and it should work on Vista (even though it says it doesn't).

    Recuva is also free. It doesn't have all the features of the other one, but it's supposed to be easier to use.

    corky842 on
  • 0blique0blique Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    Testdisk should also work too. Keep in mind that if you're hard drive is big, it could be a very slow process, since these types of programs search through the disk sector by sector looking for useful data.

    0blique on
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    0blique wrote: »
    Testdisk should also work too. Keep in mind that if you're hard drive is big, it could be a very slow process, since these types of programs search through the disk sector by sector looking for useful data.

    Yep, PC Inspector takes over 200 to scan the drive of 320gb. (I knew I should ahve gotten firewire and not USB.)

    Undead Scottsman on
  • Tanooki MarioTanooki Mario __BANNED USERS regular
    edited November 2009
    0blique wrote: »
    Testdisk should also work too. Keep in mind that if you're hard drive is big, it could be a very slow process, since these types of programs search through the disk sector by sector looking for useful data.

    Yep, PC Inspector takes over 200 to scan the drive of 320gb. (I knew I should ahve gotten firewire and not USB.)

    There's very little you can do to really speed this process up. Firewire 800 would be nice (NewEgg link to FW800/USB 2.0 bus-powered 2.5" enclsoure) for this, most of the work has to be done by the program doing the scanning. Just let 'er rip for a couple days.

    Tanooki Mario on
    I'm the artist formerly known as Satan.
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    0blique wrote: »
    Testdisk should also work too. Keep in mind that if you're hard drive is big, it could be a very slow process, since these types of programs search through the disk sector by sector looking for useful data.

    Yep, PC Inspector takes over 200 to scan the drive of 320gb. (I knew I should ahve gotten firewire and not USB.)

    There's very little you can do to really speed this process up. Firewire 800 would be nice (NewEgg link to FW800/USB 2.0 bus-powered 2.5" enclsoure) for this, most of the work has to be done by the program doing the scanning. Just let 'er rip for a couple days.

    Nah, it was only 200 minutes. Sadly PC Inspector didn't really provide anything worth saving. Every file is listed as being 1440 KB and has the name "CHECKSOME14123" or whatever. The other one didn't even work at all. (It just showed deleted files)

    Undead Scottsman on
  • Tanooki MarioTanooki Mario __BANNED USERS regular
    edited November 2009
    0blique wrote: »
    Testdisk should also work too. Keep in mind that if you're hard drive is big, it could be a very slow process, since these types of programs search through the disk sector by sector looking for useful data.

    Yep, PC Inspector takes over 200 to scan the drive of 320gb. (I knew I should ahve gotten firewire and not USB.)

    There's very little you can do to really speed this process up. Firewire 800 would be nice (NewEgg link to FW800/USB 2.0 bus-powered 2.5" enclsoure) for this, most of the work has to be done by the program doing the scanning. Just let 'er rip for a couple days.

    Nah, it was only 200 minutes. Sadly PC Inspector didn't really provide anything worth saving. Every file is listed as being 1440 KB and has the name "CHECKSOME14123" or whatever. The other one didn't even work at all. (It just showed deleted files)

    That doesn't sound right. Have you heard any scraping sounds or grinding? I'm wondering if the head is torched on that drive.

    Tanooki Mario on
    I'm the artist formerly known as Satan.
  • Undead ScottsmanUndead Scottsman Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    0blique wrote: »
    Testdisk should also work too. Keep in mind that if you're hard drive is big, it could be a very slow process, since these types of programs search through the disk sector by sector looking for useful data.

    Yep, PC Inspector takes over 200 to scan the drive of 320gb. (I knew I should ahve gotten firewire and not USB.)

    There's very little you can do to really speed this process up. Firewire 800 would be nice (NewEgg link to FW800/USB 2.0 bus-powered 2.5" enclsoure) for this, most of the work has to be done by the program doing the scanning. Just let 'er rip for a couple days.

    Nah, it was only 200 minutes. Sadly PC Inspector didn't really provide anything worth saving. Every file is listed as being 1440 KB and has the name "CHECKSOME14123" or whatever. The other one didn't even work at all. (It just showed deleted files)

    That doesn't sound right. Have you heard any scraping sounds or grinding? I'm wondering if the head is torched on that drive.

    Nope, no scraping noises. The other program can see the data just fine (it just won't let me recovery them without a $69 registry key. :()

    Undead Scottsman on
  • lapwloverlapwlover Registered User new member
    data recovery wizard do a well job of recovery files. if you overwritten the disk, it may not give help.

  • EgoEgo Registered User regular
    lapwlover wrote:
    data recovery wizard do a well job of recovery files. if you overwritten the disk, it may not give help.

    Yep, try this one, the trial version will let you pull up to a terabyte of data off a hard drive (and the program does work.)

    Erik
  • ashley77ashley77 Registered User new member
    Corrupted or deleted data can be recovered using Remo Recover (Windows) - Basic Edition software.
    The software can recover deleted data from hard drive, flash drives, memory card, external hard drive, etc. It can work on almost all versions of Windows computers. In all versions, data loss scenario is common. Suppose you are using Windows Vista and if you have deleted files from Vista then you can recover deleted files Vista easily using this software. To try out software download and install demo version of the software in your system.

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