[tech ques] recovering data from a failed hard drive

sparkle

So I have a 500 gig WD hard drive that just recently failed. It still spins, and its still recognized by the BIOS, but when I try to boot up the computer with it normally, it causes Windows to take forever to boot. And if it does boot, windows doesn't recognize it. So through much hardship, I finally got a USB DOS boot drive working and I can see the hard drive with Fdisk. So the question is, how do I transfer the data on it to my recently purchased 2 TB drive? Is there a DOS program that can help me transfer the files or repair the discs, even though DOS can't see the whole disc because they are both too large for DOS?

Djeet

Photo-rec is the only decent free file recovery app I know of. If it is a matter of MBR or partition table repair there are other utilities.

zepherin

I've used a program called spinrite with great success, but it is not free unless you are a filthy pirate, however it is a fabulous tool.

Djeet

spinrite is pretty great too. be aware, anything worthwhile will take a fuckoff long time to run, like days.

zepherin

Yeah bit by bit reconstruction and repair takes forever.

Straygatsby

Use pendrive(sp?) to load an ubuntu install onto a flash drive. Boot your PC to ubuntu using this drive and, if you're lucky, it'll detect and mount your ailing hard disk. Grab everything you can and put it on an external of some kind. Then you can relax a bit and focus on A) nuking from orbit or rebuilding.

Irridan

A note that should be made, I think (although you probably already know this) is that once a hard drive has failed, no matter if you get it running again, it is best to assume it is dead and get yourself a new one.

thatassemblyguy

I wouldn't suggest spinrite. It's not for recovering data from a failed drive because it writes all of the data back to the same drive but in a different sector that may or may not be good. On top of that, it uses too many strokes to read a bad sector that it encounters which will likely propagate any mechanical defects of the drive.

Definitely try mounting the drive under a live-boot of linux, as Straygatsby said, and use dd to attempt to copy the contents of the old disk to the new one.

dispatch.o

Honestly it sounds like a MBR or Partition error. If it still spins up and reads mostly it should be pretty easy to get your stuff. Ubuntu would be your friend as stated above.