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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/11/2007 7:29:11 PM | | You probably haven't lost your disk, it's just that your operating system is screwed. You could try running system recovery if you made a recovery disk earlier. You could also boot into safe-mode and copy small files to floppy disks then re-install you operating system. If you have a bunch of files connect a blank disk and copy files over while in safe mode, reinstall your OS, then copy them back. There are many options and I'm hoping someone with more experience can give better help here. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/11/2007 7:59:48 PM | I'm assuming it's a PC and running windows. I'm assuming the drive didn't make a really bad noise then went utterly silent.
The best way is to install a second hard drive and load windows on to it.. This will be your new C drive and your old drive will be D and all your files should be there.
If you just need a couple of things off the drive boot from a CD or Floppy and you can copy the stuff onto a floppy.
Or, you can reload Windows - you'll lose stuff that was on your desktop but everything else will still be there - modulo any parts of the drive that are now bad.
You may want to take it somebody. This is a little beyond what most people are comfortable doing.
Sounds like your boot track or parition table or both got fragged.
How old is the drive? | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 6:10:24 AM | Being as I have just recently gone through a similar experience, I have a bit of insight as to this.
If you are using a PC and Windows, I can tell you that the likely probability of what you have described is there is likely a DLL file that has become corrupted.
1) Pull the drive.
2) Install Windows to a new drive
3) put the current drive in an external HDD box and connect it via USB
4) copy your data from the current drive to the new one.
this process assumes that your data is intact. But I have seen cases where windows completely wiped everything. In these cases, the only way to recover the data is a professional service and there is a possibility even they wont be able to recover it.
If you are using a mac, the process is a bit easier.
1) Find a second Mac and a firewire cable.
2) connect the two macs together
3) Boot your mac into target mode by pressing the T key during bootup.
4) mount the disk using Disk Utility
5) Copy the files from the old HDD to the 2nd system.
You can also connect an external drive to the second system which will give you a separate system disk to backup your data.
Utilities I have utilities include:
PC: ONTRACK
MAC: Disk Warrior 4.0
Thats about it. keep in mind that this all assumes that your data and partition and HDD are still working. If not, once again, I would advise seeking professional help.
Hope this helps. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 7:02:11 AM | Hi,
If your data is really important to you then you are going to have to realize that anything you do at this point could make the problem worse then it is already.
I'm going to be super arrogant and claim that there is only one correct approach:
Have someone download and burn you a copy of Knoppix, a linux live-cd. Boot from this cd and see if you can access your files. If you can then you can copy them elsewhere, such as a usb flash drive, a shared folder on the network, or another harddisk.
If this does not work you pull the drive and take it to someone who knows what (s)he is doing. If you try to fix it yourself first and THEN take it somewhere, you will most likely get chewed out. And rightfully so, too. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 9:53:35 AM | HOLD ON,
1) Pull the drive.
2) Install Windows to a new drive
3) put the current drive in an external HDD box and connect it via USB
4) copy your data from the current drive to the new one."
you dont need to do this. Assuming your running win2000 or xp, just put the OS cd in and do a repair, this will not harm your files. you could even plug it as a slave to another computer which is already working. theres alot of options.
Have someone download and burn you a copy of Knoppix, a linux live-cd
dont take that advice | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 12:54:39 PM | ^^^^^ *Cough, Cough* ^^^^^^
Not so fast boys.
OP asked "how do I get my data back", not "How do I make this boot again".
Anybody who has some hands-on experience with data recovery, please raise your hand? Any takers? Thought so.
Consider the following:
1. The drive might be okay, but the filesystem is trashed. What do you think might happen, when you start rewriting files and directory entries on a broken filesystem?
Let me give you a hint. Risk losing everything that might have been recoverable before, do not pass "Go", and do not collect 200 dollars. Unless you made a _full_ image of the drive first, do not EVER try to make any write attempts when you need to get important data back. You do not have to be a genius to understand the importance of this.
2. The drive might be failing. In this case, no OS repair will do any good.
As for "don't take that advice". Knoppix will mount your drives read-only by default. Unless you specifically select to remount read/write, you will not harm your data by taking a look. Also, linux is generally quite a bit more forgiving of corrupted partition tables and file allocation tables then Windows is. I have had several cases where a partition had become unreadable by windows, but was perfectly able to pull everything under Linux. This is no OS/War thread, so please don't spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).
It is not "this will not harm your files", but "this _should not_ harm your files". Always expect the unexpected. Better to be safe then sorry. The only safe assumption to make is that something is seriously wrong, and that you cannot be careful enough not to mess things up further.
If you think you can rebutt my points, please do. I can use a good laugh.
Monkey. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 5:02:22 PM |
Anybody who has some hands-on experience with data recovery, please raise your hand? Any takers? Thought so
yes i do, worked in a computer shop for a year.
1. The drive might be okay, but the filesystem is trashed. What do you think might happen, when you start rewriting files and directory entries on a broken filesystem?
I believe its his boot sector thats corrupted
Let me give you a hint. Risk losing everything that might have been recoverable before, do not pass "Go", and do not collect 200 dollars. Unless you made a _full_ image of the drive first, do not EVER try to make any write attempts when you need to get important data back. You do not have to be a genius to understand the importance of this.
OK, let me explain this, an OS repair simply restore the OS to default settings sush as drivers and remove the recent installed windows updates. it does'nt touch any of your personnal files or programs.
Heck we dont even know if he can access safe mode, cause he did'nt specify anyhting
As for "don't take that advice". Knoppix will mount your drives read-only by default. Unless you specifically select to remount read/write, you will not harm your data by taking a look. Also, linux is generally quite a bit more forgiving of corrupted partition tables and file allocation tables then Windows is. I have had several cases where a partition had become unreadable by windows, but was perfectly able to pull everything under Linux. This is no OS/War thread, so please don't spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).
yeah, well knowing my experience, i would never again touch linux, unless i have to. and in this situation, theres alot of options before id turn to linux
If you think you can rebutt my points, please do. I can use a good laugh.
Well theres not much to rebutt, but your monopoly 200$ has absolutly no point. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 8:00:33 PM | Dark Nova, you didn't make me laugh. Well done.
You get the credit for the pointless monopoly reference too, now let's get back to work. After all, we do want OP to get his data back.
There are indeed a lot of options other then using Knoppix for recovery. In my opinion, most of those options aren't as good though. When faced with situations like this, the very first thing I would do is fire up my trusty Ultimate Boot CD, and run a scan on the drive using MHDD to determine what shape the drive is in. A year in a computershop really isn't all that long, but long enough to have come across a few defective harddrives. Harddisks are mechanical devices, which will eventually fail. It's not a matter of if they fail, it is only a matter of when. If the drive is in very bad shape, and the data is really important, I will inform the customer that they might want to consider sending the drive to either Ontrack or Seagate Recovery Services. There is a lot they can do in their cleanrooms that us mortals cannot. If only a few unreadable sectors show up, I will re-run the MHDD scan with the remap option turned on.
When important data is at risk, the next thing I will do is make a full copy of the drive. Personally, I prefer to use g4u for this which is based on netBSD, but there are many cloning tools around that might work equally well. G4U is slow and user unfriendly, but does a good job on unreliable drives. If this doesn't go well, I'll put the drive in a ziploc and put it in the freezer for a little bit. Remember, harddrives are mechanical devices and the cold will make the metal parts shrink a little bit, reducing friction. This is not an urban legend. The icepack is your friend. Condensation is not, but it's a matter of choosing the lesser of evils.
Once I have an image, I breathe a little easier. Next, I will boot knoppix and see if I can mount the drive. If I can, files get saved to a network share in order of importance. If I can't, I will check if the partition table seems to be ok. It is bad news if it isn't. At this point, knoppix gets shut down and more powerful recovery tools get their turn. I like the Paragon stuff, but again, there are many. Needless to say, when dealing with a broken drive, the best choice is to work on a copy of your freshly made image, but this is rather time consuming. When the data is important enough, it might be worth the effort.
Only after I have the files that are absolutely needed, will I try to revive the windows installation on the original drive (if it's not broken), or the second copy. Some people have suggested connecting the drive to a working windows system. While this might work, it still is something to be careful with. Windows might decide that scandisk needs to do it's thing, and start fixing away. You do not want this to happen unless you already made a copy. It might fix the problem, or it might make it worse. I said before, never, ever, write anything to a drive that you are trying to recover important information from.
If you think it's the boot sector, you still don't run an OS repair. The first thing to do is boot into the recovery console (from the windows install cd), do a chkdsk /r, a fixmbr, a fixboot, and maybe a bootcfg /rebuild. Only after that doesn't fix your problem should you try a repair install.
In my experience, there is a lot of options after I turn to linux. That you aren't comfortable with it doesn't mean much. It doesn't change the fact that it can be an awesome recovery tool. It doesn't cost anything and it is safe, unless it's used by an ID10T. With just a little bit of luck, you'll have your files secured in under 10 minutes. How long does a repair install and redoing the updates take you? How certain are you that nothing will go wrong? All recovery specialists will make an image and then recover the data from there. For those interested to learn the real deal, check out the hddguru.com forums.
It seems pretty obvious to me that OP cannot boot in safe mode. After all, he said he gets the "Insert boot disk" and you yourself think it's a corrupted boot sector. If your boot sector and/or bootfiles are corrupted, you cannot get into safe mode. If your partition table is invalid, your repair install can go horribly wrong. I learned this the hard way. One of my first recovery attempts was a system that got wiped by a Michelangelo infection. That was in 1992 and I had to turn to using norton diskedit and search for text strings on drive level. Couldn't get much, by the way.
Anyways, enough said. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. The end result is really all that counts.
Monkey. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 8:35:36 PM | I read the OPs comment more carefully and it sounds to me like Windows is just corrupted - missing or broken files. It might even come up in safe mode.
He's still posting so it the easiest thing to do is probably to put the drive in the machine he's posting from and just copy the files over.
I don't think the drive had failed, nor do I think track 0 is fragged.
To the OP: if you still need help I'm sure we can walk you through puttnig the drive in another system to coy your files over. You'll need a philips scewdriver and a clear mind and some patience. But it's easy and anybody can do it. Maybe reading glasses too.
So let us know if you have another computer and a screwdriver and ability and desire to do this.
I used to work at a disk drive company and wrote recovery software and drivers. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 8:41:03 PM |
If this doesn't go well, I'll put the drive in a ziploc and put it in the freezer for a little bit. Remember, harddrives are mechanical devices and the cold will make the metal parts shrink a little bit, reducing friction. This is not an urban legend. The icepack is your friend. Condensation is not, but it's a matter of choosing the lesser of evils.
HAHAHA, i heard about that. never actually seen it tought
If you think it's the boot sector, you still don't run an OS repair. The first thing to do is boot into the recovery console (from the windows install cd), do a chkdsk /r, a fixmbr, a fixboot, and maybe a bootcfg /rebuild. Only after that doesn't fix your problem should you try a repair install.
I agree, check disk is the first thing to do to repair any bad sectors.
In my experience, there is a lot of options after I turn to linux. That you aren't comfortable with it doesn't mean much. It doesn't change the fact that it can be an awesome recovery tool. It doesn't cost anything and it is safe, unless it's used by an ID10T.
wait, since i had bad experience with it, are you calling me an idiot???
It seems pretty obvious to me that OP cannot boot in safe mode. After all, he said he gets the "Insert boot disk" and you yourself think it's a corrupted boot sector. If your boot sector and/or bootfiles are corrupted, you cannot get into safe mode.
i was just adding this du to the fact that he did'nt give enought information. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 8:58:23 PM |
ziploc and put it in the freezer
This is for drives that won't spin up, that is, the primary windings of the drive motor can't overcome stiction in the bearing assembly.
Shaking the drive from side to side usually fixes that. I've had to do this a few times and it usually works. I've never fixed a drive by putting it in the freezer no matter how many times I've tried. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/12/2007 10:27:38 PM | Heh, I thought I was done writing for the day, but I kinda like this subject.
I wasn't actually calling anyone in this thread an ID10T. It proves common sense to stay away from tools that you are not comfortable with. I'm curious to know what your bad experience with linux was though. It may not be perfect (it isn't), but it has come a long way since the dark ages of way back when.
As a diversion, I can give a fun example of a true idiot. I used to work for a company that sells (among lots of other server hardware) external raid arrays. The story came from one of the senior engineers, and he claimed it really happened. It must have, as this is just far too stupid to make up.
Some customer had hired a junior system administrator. One day, a disk in their array failed, and the hotspare had kicked in. Up to that point, everything was peachy. Everything should have been just fine.
Should have.
This lemonhead of a sysadmin probably was a little OCD. After replacing the failed drive, it bothered him that there was now one inactive drive somewhere around the middle of his stack of disks. As soon as he got the chance to shut down the server and the array he neatly rearranged the disks, so that the hotspare would end up as the last drive. When he turned everything back on, the raid controller went into stress as a result of this brilliant action. They lost all their data, and Junior lost his job.
As for freezing a troublesome drive. Yes, I have actually done this. It is NOT a magical mystery cure all, and I have never seen it fix a drive permanently. Sometimes it has helped in getting files back, and sometimes it has not. It is for sure a very last-ditch effort, only to be tried when everything else has failed and nobody wants to spend the money to send the drive to the real specialists. Professional data recovery can be quite expensive.
I don't see checkdisk as the first action on fixing bad sectors, but rather the second. I made it a habit to use MHDD on every suspect drive I get my hands on, especially when windows will do the endless reboot, or comes up with the black screen complaining that it can't find the registry. Having it remap bad blocks will quite often result in a system being able to boot again, especially when you select last known-good configuration. It's a great tool that is well worth the money (it's freeware).
I agree with y'all that OP is a little sparse with his information here. Give us some more details please, we're all scrambling trying to be helpful here man! | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 1:13:03 AM |
haha, youve actually tried it, haha
Yeah, what, so you're perfect with backups? :-)
When you have a dead drive you'll try anything. I've even swapped the on-board controllers on two identical drives.
I have lots of dead drives here. They fall into two categories: fried on-disk controller (system won't regognize the drive) or it won't spin up (old dead mechanics). Heat and/or static is usually what does them in. Hint: case fans are your friend. I have systems here with such large fans you honestly feel an annoying draft if you sit neat them. I have some bigass Sun servers no longer in use, sitting in the barn that have so many fans in them you almost need earmuffs just to sit in the same room as them. I swear I could heat the barn with them too, if I could run the multiple 30A circuits those pigs require. I use IBM 1U servers these days instead. But I digress. Badly.
As for scanning for bad sectors since real men use SCSI drives you let the controller do this at a low level and it'll map out the bad sectors and windows/unix will never see them. In theory is you have S.M.A.R.T enabled on an IDE drive you should never see a bad sector until the drive experinces catastrophic fialure.
Usually a "tinkle tinkle tinkle THUD GGGGggggggrrrrrrrrnnd" noise. Then the smoke escapes and it all goes downhill from point. Frankly I haven't heard this since 8" full height drives were the hot tip. Remind me to drag up the story of the vaporized floppy drive sometime.
Like I was saying about backups... | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 6:07:30 AM |
I have lots of dead drives here.
Usually a "tinkle tinkle tinkle THUD GGGGggggggrrrrrrrrnnd" noise. Then the smoke escapes and it all goes downhill from point.
what kind of shitty brand do you used, in all my life i think i came across 2 dead HDD that were WD products. i have never seen a maxtor or seagate fail. Its all about the company and the quality of the product. I know that HDD will eventualy die, espescialy if you use it everyday. The duration of a HDD is about 5-6years if you use it constantly, but even there i have 10years old hdd still working. Why are your drives dying here and there???? | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 7:40:31 AM | Read it again... 8" full height drives. They were Shugarts and it was about 1981.
I've seen all brands of drives fail. I"m not sure I've ever seen a WD work.
To be honest Maxtor is the one I trust least after WD. I've had the best luck with IBM and Seagate. I don't think my drives fail in any higher percentage than anybody elses. I just have rather a lot of them.
IDE drives last 5-6 years, SCS drives, meant for 24x7 operations in servers last longer, 10 years is by no means unusual, but in the youtube/mp3 era who needs a 4G drive? But I do still use them. Windows for example runs best when you have one drive for the system, one drive for the swap partition and one drive for your data and a 4G drive is abought enough for a drive to load windows onto. Even better if each spindle is a raid array. Even better if each array has one drive per channel but at this point it gets a bit silly - heat is a major issue to say nothing of the fact you can't get them all into a case or that you just used $300 of LVD cables in one system. Sure was fast though, and fun to try. Once. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 8:33:15 AM | If you can get it to boot into safe mode, you could go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer and check the log files to see if you can get some clue as to what is actually happening. Maybe a corrupt file or driver loading at startup?
Also..what about System restore if its an XP machine? | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 1:19:07 PM | If it won't boot into safe mode....
So... if the MBR is damaged, the BIOS can't locate and start the operating system. When your BIOS detects a damaged MBR or boot sector, you'll see ominous messages like Invalid partition table, Error loading operating system, or Missing operating system. In some cases, dark clouds will apppear on the horizon, and you may hear the distant rumble of thunder. But fortunately, the Recovery Console offers some tools to help clear up the problem.
Your Windows XP setup CDROM has a tool called the Recovery Console, which is designed to help you repair a damaged master boot record or boot sector. (In some cases these files are stored on a separate partition on the hard drive & there are no CD's unless you have created them)
To start the Recovery Console and fix your damaged MBR using the CD's, follow these steps:
Restart your computer with the Windows XP Setup disk in the CDROM drive.
If you are prompted to press a key to start the computer from CDROM, do so quickly. Otherwise it may try to boot from the hard drive.
After a few minutes, you'll see a prompt to press the R key to start the Recovery Console.
When Recovery Console starts, it will prompt you to enter a number corresponding to the Windows XP installation that you need to repair. In most cases, you'll enter "1" (which will be the only choice). If you press ENTER without typing a number, Recovery Console will quit and restart your computer.
Enter your Administrator password. If you don't enter the correct password, you cannot continue.
At the Recovery Console command prompt, type fixmbr and then verify that you want to proceed.
Your damaged MBR will be replaced with a shiny new one, and you should then be able to boot your system normally. In some cases, you may need to repair the boot sector in addition to the MBR. If your system still doesn't boot properly, repeat the steps above, but issue the fixboot command instead. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 7:11:43 PM | | In any case, this type of problem shouldn't be solved by reading forums, as helpful as the people may be. If the OP has no idea whats going on, he is definatly going to have a problem following any suggestions on here to get his data back. The best way would be to have someone in his house or at a pc repair shop doing the work. There is no easy quick fix and suffice to say, it's a long task to get what is needed of the drive. There are many solutions that will work and clearly some that are just plain ridiculous such as the hard drive in the freezer. I have come across that nonsense in another forum a few years ago as well as tried it myself. Lets not forget the one where you can remove the platters of a failed drive and put them into another drive. LMFAO. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 10:28:32 PM | I work for a major computer manufactor. You can take it for data recovery, can get costly. Costly to some people has different meanings. Can try a check disk r from the command prompt by inserting the os cd and booting off of it. Then at the first screen press enter and then press 1 for the windows you want to log onto. Then type chkdsk /r
at the dos prompt then press enter. Will try and fix some of the files. Again, this is just my opinion and hope it helps. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/13/2007 10:40:17 PM | There is no easy quick fix and suffice to say, it's a long task to get what is needed of the drive.
You can put the drive in another system and copy the data off in about 15 minutes.
Open the cases of both computers.
Move the jumper on the "dead" drive from "master" to "slave". It's marked on the drive.
Connect the IDE cable and power cable to the dead drive. It can just rest on the case. The cable and power connector only go in one way.
Power it up and let it boot. Now your "dead" drive appears as drive D:.
Copy the files to C
Power it down, undo the drive, button the case back up. There's your data.
Of course this presupposes you have a second working computer. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/14/2007 1:11:16 AM | [QUOTE]You can put the drive in another system and copy the data off in about 15 minutes.
Open the cases of both computers.
Move the jumper on the "dead" drive from "master" to "slave". It's marked on the drive.
Connect the IDE cable and power cable to the dead drive. It can just rest on the case. The cable and power connector only go in one way.
Power it up and let it boot. Now your "dead" drive appears as drive D:.
Copy the files to C
Power it down, undo the drive, button the case back up. There's your data.
Of course this presupposes you have a second working computer.
[/QUOTE]
I am a computer proffesional, out of it all i agree this is the easiest and best solution. The rest all have a chance of possibly working but if you want your data back it is the fastest and most reliable option. | |
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| My hard drive died....I need my info on that HD!!!!!!!!!! HOW?
Posted: 4/15/2007 10:15:24 AM | as was advised, DO NOT use live discs if you value your HDD or its contents. these so called "live" versions risk not only damaging the file structure on your HDD's but risk completely frying those HDD's. the best approach is to put the disc in a USB box, it will suffer the least amount of stress there, adn if you hear/notice ANYTHING thats not suppose to be happening, like squeeks, squeels or scratching sounds, you can pull the USB cable immediately without risking any further damage to the drive.
I have more than 15 years experience with the internals of HDDs, tearing them down, replacing pickup heads, which make a sharp grinding or scratching sound when the HDD coils up, and replacing drive motors, which squeek or squeel when coiling up. DO NOT try to take the drive apart yourself if you hear any such sounds, and the data is valuable to you, take it is so the drive can have its platters removed and put in a reader. this has to be done in whats called a 10/100 room. a 10/100 room is a room that has no more than 10 parts per 100 million parts clean air or otherwise known as a "Clean Room". 1 dust particle under a pickup head can permanently damage a HDD platter adn the data reading/writing ability of the drive. so, if the drive isn't making any strange sounds, and you can still hear it coil-up (start) then the drive is physically fine to work with. a USB box would be the ideal solution, as I described why above, if thats not cost effective for you, make it a secondary on the IDE or SATA bus to retrive your data. you prolly just lost your boot.ini or onfig.ini, which will hinder your windows system from booting and leave you with a black screen with a cursor blinking in the top left corner of the screen, or a message that the disc contains no OS. | |
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can I get it? What can I do to get the info off of it. I boot up and it gets to the desktop........Then black screens on me ,tells me to insert boot disk? arrrrrrrrrrggg!!!!!
