Harddisk recovery software?

Simon F

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Hi all,
A month ago I replaced one of my hard drives with a newer and larger one and, lo and behold, today Windoze first tells me it has errors and follows that up by telling me it's "unformatted". Suffice to say, I was not best pleased. (Especially since I'd just deleted the old copy of the data about a week beforehand).

There seems to be a number of products on the net (none free by the look of it) but I don't fancy forking out cash for an unrecommended product.

Has anyone had any experience with these sort of disaster recovery tools?
 
The only one I have had success with in the past is Get Data Back

You can download a trial version which will allow you to see if it works on your drive without recovering the data.

http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm

Very highly recommended :)

Edit: Ignore windows when it tells you it is unformatted and schedule a chkdsk on it through My Computer. Once chkdsk managed to recover the missing file and partitions for me without needing to use 3rd party software tools. Your mileage may vary.
 
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I would not recommend using chkdsk to try to repair a drive with problems.


Out of 5-6 cases, used by me or my friends, it has succeeded once at recovering a few files. In ALL the cases it resulted in corrupt files and the disk couldn't be saved by other software. Do not allow it to try to repair anything on your hd. Scanning for errors is ok, but please use a different program to fix those errors and save yourself from tears and anger.
 
maaoouud said:
I would not recommend using chkdsk to try to repair a drive with problems..
I wasn't planning on writing to the drive.

As an update I downloaded and tried "PC Inspector" which was suggested by a few comments on Usenet as a good free recovery tool. For me, however, it simply crashed with a null pointer read when it found the damaged disk :(
 
Did you try Get Data Back by runtime?

Your drive may be beyond software recovery but depending on how important your data is you can get that data back (soz for the bad pun) but it will be expensive! I guess you know this already.
 
Tahir said:
The only one I have had success with in the past is Get Data Back

Ditto. I've used the FAT and NTFS versions with success in the past.

Tip: if you ever do this as a favour for a mate, try and get them to buy you a drink for every GB you recover. :D
 
maaoouud said:
I would not recommend using chkdsk to try to repair a drive with problems.


Out of 5-6 cases, used by me or my friends, it has succeeded once at recovering a few files. In ALL the cases it resulted in corrupt files and the disk couldn't be saved by other software. Do not allow it to try to repair anything on your hd. Scanning for errors is ok, but please use a different program to fix those errors and save yourself from tears and anger.
I actually had good luck with chkdsk earlier this year even when a recovery program who's name I don't remember didn't work. Of course I might have tried chkdsk first and hit the problem you mention. Can't remember though. chkdsk did take an entire day to run though.

My next step was going to be trying SpinRite, but I didn't end up needing it. I'm not sure if the program is any good, but it might be worth a try.
 
..

Tip: if you ever do this as a favour for a mate, try and get them to buy you a drink for every GB you recover.

That would be a lot of coca cola for me then!

Tip#2: don't do favours for "family", they end up saving and watching TV whilst you are working on their PC and you end up being called out by them every other day for their "new problem".. grr!
 
Tahir said:
Did you try Get Data Back by runtime?

Your drive may be beyond software recovery but depending on how important your data is you can get that data back (soz for the bad pun) but it will be expensive! I guess you know this already.
Not yet. I also thought I'd wait and see if the guys at work have any software but everyone is still off at the moment.
 
_xxx_ said:
GetDataBack saved me where every other tool failed. Try it, it rocks.

SimonF,

I've had something similar happen to two of my larger storage drives. Windows did the same thing with drives are bad, and then after a reboot it said the drive was unformatted. This was on a 250Gig and a 160Gig drive that were both over 88% full. GetDataBack was able to recover everything that wasn't in the physically bad media section(s). Fortunately, it was only TV shows on both drives, so I would be able to replace them if I wanted to wait for another 2-4 months of redownloading them. But GetDataBack saved me the hassle of having to do that. In the end, I only had 3 files that weren't fully recoverable (~ 900 Megs). Of course your mileage may vary, but GetDataBack is the best software-level recovery out there.
 
BRiT said:
SimonF,

I've had something similar happen to two of my larger storage drives. Windows did the same thing with drives are bad, and then after a reboot it said the drive was unformatted. This was on a 250Gig and a 160Gig drive that were both over 88% full. GetDataBack was able to recover everything that wasn't in the physically bad media section(s). Fortunately, it was only TV shows on both drives, so I would be able to replace them if I wanted to wait for another 2-4 months of redownloading them. But GetDataBack saved me the hassle of having to do that. In the end, I only had 3 files that weren't fully recoverable (~ 900 Megs). Of course your mileage may vary, but GetDataBack is the best software-level recovery out there.
Thanks for the review. If work doesn't have a suitable tool I'll probably go with that one.

My disk had mostly video of holidays and of our baby daughter that I'd been editing. I guess I could get those off tape again but editing them takes a very long time.
 
Hi all,
I've gone with the "Get Data Back" route but it's only found (IIRC) about 1/3rd of the files. Presumably this is because a file allocation structure (or whatever they are called) was scragged.

I see that it has the ability to identify "lost" files by the file header 4CCs (well 2-8CCs) but it only has a measly list of about 8 types. Has anyone seen or constructed a more comprehensive list?
 
Try data recovery software by Ontrack.

You can recover raw data even if you damaged the file index of your hard drive.
 
Simon F said:
I've gone with the "Get Data Back" route but it's only found (IIRC) about 1/3rd of the files. Presumably this is because a file allocation structure (or whatever they are called) was scragged.

Was that with it scanning the entire drive for lost files and reconstructing file structures?
 
Problem with Get Data Back is that it takes too long... especially if you only looking for one file to retrieve.

But getting back huge data .. it does work well.

With Ontrack .. I have problems .. when ever I try running the program .. it bombs out. Don't know why .. even on new OS installations ... it still bombs out. When it used to work .. I still didn't like it so much .. but it was quick at getting back recently deleted files.

US
 
BRiT said:
Was that with it scanning the entire drive for lost files and reconstructing file structures?
Well... I enabled lost file scanning but it only knows about a few types of file, by examining the signature 4CC/8CC at the start of the file, and I can't remember what exactly was on the disk. It certainly hasn't found everything.

How can you enable "reconstructing structures"?

The disk is getting worse - the second (much smaller) partition is now reporting errors.
Ideally I should make an image of the first partition but I don't have space for it (110GB) :(
 
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