Hard Drive Recovery Programs

leaf · May 2007

So, I was at work with my external harddrive, and a transformer blew down the street because of a fire in one of the business complexes.

Was working fine when there, but now it's fucked. Any computer I try plugging it into, cannot read it, with only a red light flashing on the drive and an error a minute later saying that the drive needs to be formatted.

Basically, this drive had some very important shit on it. I mean, to the extent I would pay upwards of $500 to send it in to get a drive recovery. Hopefully, it won't come to that.

So I ask, are there any drive recovery programs that you know of, you have used, or someone you know has used, with success?

Money is no object.

TheSonicRetard · May 2007

you could try formatting it then maybe undelete?

That seems risky, though.

Pheezer · May 2007

TheSonicRetard wrote: »

you could try formatting it then maybe undelete?

That seems risky, though.

Yeah uhh, bad idea.

It sounds like the drive controller is maybe having serious trouble, or you've got a badly fucked file system. You're actually likely best off to take this in to a professional instead of playing with it any further yourself.

EDIT:
Also now you know why back-ups are supposed to be redundant. PA learned this the hard way too, a few years back.

leaf · May 2007

Yeah, this was my backup drive, and I hadn't re-copied several archives of mine after my main hd crashed.

So, basically, I've been swearing non-stop for the last 15 minutes.

Edit: I've only just in the last week worked out the issues with the other drive, I hadn't bothered re-copying everything just yet because I wasn't sure if the main system was stable. Now this happens, and I'm just messed.

Phoenix-D · May 2007

If money is no object, professional recovery first. A LOT of the recovery procedures are destructive- if you get all your data, good. If you don't, you don't have a chance of getting the rest.

RyakStorm · May 2007

I did a lot of research when I last had a major hard drive problem, I used R-Studio and it worked like a charm, I recovered 99% of the files from my home server - 3TB's worth. Took a long time, but cheaper than sending out 13 drives for recovery. I also recovered a lot of files I had deleted in the past, nothing I wanted any more but it was an interesting process.

Long story short I set up a VNC on my server so I could access it easily from home, however there was a flaw in the security of that version of Real VNC and the password was hacked, someone got on there and got busy formatting the drives.

Learned a good lesson that day.

leaf · May 2007

My roommate mentioned that program, and I was looking at it myself. Does it save the complete file trees? Several thousand jpg's are not fun when they're entirely out of order or are given arbitrary designations like recovery_a_0001.jpg.

Edit: as happened when I tried recovering on my other drive with a different program (that drive only had some school work and games on it, nothing I cared about losing, unlike this time) so I gave this other program a shot. It saved a little bit, but a lot was corrupt, unrecoverable, and also had large sections of data lost.

Xantus · May 2007

if money is no object, http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

ArcticMonkey · May 2007

leaf wrote: »

My roommate mentioned that program, and I was looking at it myself. Does it save the complete file trees? Several thousand jpg's are not fun when they're entirely out of order or are given arbitrary designations like recovery_a_0001.jpg.

Edit: as happened when I tried recovering on my other drive with a different program (that drive only had some school work and games on it, nothing I cared about losing, unlike this time) so I gave this other program a shot. It saved a little bit, but a lot was corrupt, unrecoverable, and also had large sections of data lost.

I've had good experiences with R-Studio. It saves the file trees if it finds them. You get two views, one with the file structure and one with all the files it cannot place in the file tree because of missing locators or something.

GrimReaper · May 2007

If just the formatting information is messed up like the file table you may be able to recover the partition using Partition Table Doctor, if you need to recover files that have been messed up somehow then use GetDataBack.

I recommend Partition Table Doctor since it sounds like the partition information is messed up, chances are that will fix it.

Just a note, GetDataBack comes in two seperate versions.. one for NTFS and one for FAT drives. Make sure you know which it was formatted to before you go buying it.

I've used both programs in the past and they have served me well.

EDIT: This probably belongs here.

Unco-ordinated · May 2007

I don't see the point in making a new thread so I've got a similar question. I accidentally dropped my iPod in water and since it had some pretty important documents on it, I was wondering how easy the data would be to recover. It was only in the water for a second or two but obviously, won't work.

lunchbox12682 · May 2007

For the ipod, let it dry out for a few days, maybe a week. Often, it will work just fine once all the moisture is gone.

Penny Arcade

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