TheVille

Ok my good friend sent me an email asking about what to do with recovering his data.. I didnt have any answers so I thought maybe one of my villun buddies could help.. Here is the email from my buddy..

Here is the chain of events:

Windows XP and internal Seagate Barracuda 200GB ide drive.

Upon re-installing windows on a separate drive, when rebooting, I didn’t realize windows began running a chkdsk on the 200GB drive above mentioned.

After a couple of minutes of seeing “deleting orphan file…..177123” continuously run up the screen with progressive numbers, I manually powered down in fear/realizing that I could be watching my files vanish before my very eyes.

After rebooting, the 200GB drive is “not recognizable” by windows and “needs to be formatted”.

Would LOVE to recover anything and everything possible….

Is he running windows from the other drive?

Try installing windows on a secondary smaller drive.

Then see if it recognises it as an extra drive.

S

I assume you are saying the other dirve as the first drive he mentioned and yes he is running windows on that. He tried to re-install windows on a second drive. He explained it all above.

Looks like the drive was corrupted somehow. I've also heard of that happening with corrupt memory or drivers. I would test the hardware (hard drive and RAM) and reinstall/update the IDE drivers before doing anything else.

I'm not sure how to go about recovering the files, though.

Memtest86+ would be a great program to check the memory. As far as the hard drive goes, use SeaTools to check the drive for hardware issues.

SeaTools
Memtest86+

I'm sad to say though, that much of the data may be lost. This does not look very good.

As a last resort, Seagate has a service where they will recover data from a broken drive. It is expensive, but if they fail they refund the charge. Staples office stores should have more info on this.

I don't suppose this friend is anywhere near Stockton, CA?

There should be various companies that offer data recovery services for HD if it's badly damaged, though I think those can cost several hundred bucks.

There's probably software to do data analysis/recovery too, but I don't know what is good.

Thanks Stevo , Dred and Gator! I will tell him to test it and then check out the data recovery places.

He lives in Austin TX Dred..

Thanks guys

[quote="=USV=Nuckin";p="100089"]
Thanks Stevo , Dred and Gator! I will tell him to test it and then check out the data recovery places.

He lives in Austin TX Dred..

Thanks guys
[/quote]

*opens mouth to include himself, realises ddnt help, dsnt say anything*

....


Is it like corporate infromation such as payroll and whatnot, or is it like everyday average joe things?

[quote="mr_s";p="100112"][quote="=USV=Nuckin";p="100089"]
Thanks Stevo , Dred and Gator! I will tell him to test it and then check out the data recovery places.

He lives in Austin TX Dred..

Thanks guys
[/quote]

*opens mouth to include himself, realises ddnt help, dsnt say anything*

....


Is it like corporate infromation such as payroll and whatnot, or is it like everyday average joe things?[/quote]

Thanks to you as well S. Not really sure.. He owns his own company and work at home so I am sure it is pretty important. I didnt ask him though.

[quote="=USV=Nuckin";p="100126"][quote="mr_s";p="100112"][quote="=USV=Nuckin";p="100089"]
Thanks Stevo , Dred and Gator! I will tell him to test it and then check out the data recovery places.

He lives in Austin TX Dred..

Thanks guys
[/quote]

*opens mouth to include himself, realises ddnt help, dsnt say anything*

....


Is it like corporate infromation such as payroll and whatnot, or is it like everyday average joe things?[/quote]

Thanks to you as well S. Not really sure.. He owns his own company and work at home so I am sure it is pretty important. I didnt ask him though.[/quote]


noooo i bet its just he doens't want to lose his prize pr0n collection... Maybe ask nanite to see if he knows any good data recovery ideas?

If you can get a skilled technician to help, using ddrescue with a Linux boot disc may get most of the data off of a failing hard drive. Linux has a steep learning curve and as far as I know, ddrescue is only usable through a command line interface.

[quote="=USV=Nuckin";p="100126"]
[quote="mr_s";p="100112"][quote="=USV=Nuckin";p="100089"]
Thanks Stevo , Dred and Gator! I will tell him to test it and then check out the data recovery places.

He lives in Austin TX Dred..

Thanks guys
[/quote]

*opens mouth to include himself, realises ddnt help, dsnt say anything*

....


Is it like corporate infromation such as payroll and whatnot, or is it like everyday average joe things?[/quote]

Thanks to you as well S. Not really sure.. He owns his own company and work at home so I am sure it is pretty important. I didnt ask him though.
[/quote]

oooooh...

that no good.

well if its THAT important, i recommend geting some professional to fix it, that is if he hasn't got time to do reseach and whatnot.


hope he fixed it

Talked to my buddy this weekend and he has another question.

Is it’s possible to get windows to recognize the drive without having to reformat it. It shows up in “Disk Management” and is labeled as “healthy” and also shows up within windows explorer and my computer, but when trying to access it I get the message “d:\is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.”

Here's a little pair of programs that might be worth trying:

ADRC Data Recovery Software Tools

Unless the bad drive is physically damaged (doesn't sound like it is), this program can do a raw copy of the info on the bad drive to a good one, where it can be worked with. Make sure the good drive has enough free space to have a complete clone of the bad drive copied on to it. As a bonus, it's free.

ADRC Data Recovery Express

There's a trialware version for free, and full version is just $7. It's meant to help with recovering from corruptions, formattings, and damaged partitions. Once the cloned data is on the healthy drive, execute this program on it, and it may be able to recover and rebuild the files in it.

I'm not 100% sure it'll work, obviously, but it's worth a shot.

[quote="Alizée Fan";p="100570"]Here's a little pair of programs that might be worth trying:

ADRC Data Recovery Software Tools

Unless the bad drive is physically damaged (doesn't sound like it is), this program can do a raw copy of the info on the bad drive to a good one, where it can be worked with. Make sure the good drive has enough free space to have a complete clone of the bad drive copied on to it. As a bonus, it's free.

ADRC Data Recovery Express

There's a trialware version for free, and full version is just $7. It's meant to help with recovering from corruptions, formattings, and damaged partitions. Once the cloned data is on the healthy drive, execute this program on it, and it may be able to recover and rebuild the files in it.

I'm not 100% sure it'll work, obviously, but it's worth a shot.[/quote]

thank you I will let him know about this.