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Help Me Recover Data From a Corrupt HD
Whiniest Man On Earth
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A few days ago, one of my media HDs just up and decided not to work. Instead of showing up as E: with my drive label, it was just E: Local Disk, and everything on it was gone. I restarted and it worked again, but I resolved to back up my data.
Like an idiot, I let some time pass before I did this, because I had to work for a few days. I started to copy my MP3s over and the drive stopped working in the middle of the transfer, giving me an error that the file was corrupt. I tried to copy them in segments, but nothing would work. I restarted and the drive was back to being "E: Local Disk" again.
I have tried using Recuva to get my data back, and it only found about 200 files. Needless to say, I had much more than that. Other similar tools found similar results. Nothing came back with anything remotely approaching a reasonable chunk of my old data.
I have also tried using a live boot of Linux to mount the drive and hopefully recover some things from it. Not a single live distro of Linux boots to my system. The latest Ubuntu, Knoppix/Gnoppix, Knoppix STD, a BSD distro I had lying around... nothing works. They all start to boot up and just hang at various points during the operation. I can't be sure what is causing it - I'm no good with Linux, but I thought I could figure out how to do what I needed to. Sadly, it doesn't seem like this will be an option.
I also tried to install Ubuntu next to my XP Pro install, but that didn't work either. It hung up on the same progress bar. Just to be sure, I left it running for about an hour and a half - still no love.
I need to get this back - it's so much of my media collection (about 200+ gigs worth) that I would be pretty upset if it was gone forever. Help?
Like an idiot, I let some time pass before I did this, because I had to work for a few days. I started to copy my MP3s over and the drive stopped working in the middle of the transfer, giving me an error that the file was corrupt. I tried to copy them in segments, but nothing would work. I restarted and the drive was back to being "E: Local Disk" again.
I have tried using Recuva to get my data back, and it only found about 200 files. Needless to say, I had much more than that. Other similar tools found similar results. Nothing came back with anything remotely approaching a reasonable chunk of my old data.
I have also tried using a live boot of Linux to mount the drive and hopefully recover some things from it. Not a single live distro of Linux boots to my system. The latest Ubuntu, Knoppix/Gnoppix, Knoppix STD, a BSD distro I had lying around... nothing works. They all start to boot up and just hang at various points during the operation. I can't be sure what is causing it - I'm no good with Linux, but I thought I could figure out how to do what I needed to. Sadly, it doesn't seem like this will be an option.
I also tried to install Ubuntu next to my XP Pro install, but that didn't work either. It hung up on the same progress bar. Just to be sure, I left it running for about an hour and a half - still no love.
I need to get this back - it's so much of my media collection (about 200+ gigs worth) that I would be pretty upset if it was gone forever. Help?
Whiniest Man On Earth on
0
Posts
I was going to say the same thing...
One thing that works suprisingly well is hooking hard drives up to a Mac.
Apples OS seems to be able to deal with corrupt boot sectors and various other problems on windows formatted hard drives very well. You can purchase a cheap hard drive enclosure for this for about $20-30 at any electronics retailer. If your at a best buy or some place similar ask them to run a quick test on your hard drive (only if its IDE most places dont have a sata tester). Make sure to specify the test the hard drive on a hard drive test machine, and not just plug it into a computer. These machines have a few different tests they can run one of them is a short test that takes about 1 to 2 minutes.
If it can't pass that then you need to either send it to a hard drive recovery place. You should note however this will cost several hundred dollars probably. So this would only be cost effective if all of your stuff was legitimately bought and you have no alternative to get it redownloaded from the source. ( I have been told by apple reps that Itunes will let you redownload purchased music if you go through their support).
Is this a HD I can reformat and re-use or should I just give up on it entirely and get a replacement?
Now, I need to figure out if I can re-format and re-use this HD, or if it's time to buy another one. Any advice/input?
500 GB, $80