Recovering files from problematic hard drive.

[Nick]

Hey guys, hopefully one of you will be able to help me.

I've got a hard drive from the office I work at that everyone thinks is dead. There is a lot of crucial information on this drive that was not backed up that needs to be recovered so it's been my take home project today to mess around with while working on other things around the house.

The hard drive starts up, spins without any unusual sounds, bios recognizes it and lists it under IDE drives during boot, it even gets to the load Windows part where you can select safe mode. If I select normal boot or last safe configuration it just stops, if I try safe mode it starts loading drivers and gets down to an AGP driver or something and freezes. So I set the jumpers to slave and tried plugging it in two other Windows machines and it freezes them upon starting as well.

Now, since the drive seems to be mechanically sound I tried plugging it into a couple Linux machines that I have here at the house (Redhat7,Redhat9,Mandrake10.x). All of them see the drive and boot without problem; however, it's a NTFS drive and I haven't been able to read the drive with any of the Linux computers. I'll go ahead and say that I'm not that familiar with Linux. I've played with it for years and setup Apache and had machines as web servers for when I used to freelance web design but other than that I'm pretty much a newbie. I tried navigating into /dev/hdb or whatever it was listed as being on the hardware manager and I cannot get anywhere.

Can anyone suggest anything? Really all I need is just a four megabyte access database off of this drive. If I could just get that off the drive everything would be fine.

 

[sep]

What brand of HDD is it? The manufacturers usually have tools that are boot from floppy for such cases.
Also, I'm not sure about other linux distros, but Ubuntu can read NTFS fine, but it would be in read-only form, which I don't reckon would be an issue since you only need to get 4MB data from the HDD. Basic guide to mounting NTFS drive.

I do not know if there is an IDE -> USB convertor (I know there is one for SATA) but connecting the HDD via USB after booting the Windows machine, could be another approach.

 

[Decker]

Could try installing a new recovery copy of XP on the disk, just tell it to install to a different folder.

Should allow you to copy the file off, if it complains take ownership of the file as the permissions will be screwed as far as the fresh install is concerned.

 

[Robert]

The safest thing to do is to connect it as a slave hard drive to a XP machine, then boot into XP and you will see the hard drive listed under "My Computer". You can then access all the files on the hard drive.

 

[Nick]

The safest thing to do is to connect it as a slave hard drive to a XP machine, then boot into XP and you will see the hard drive listed under "My Computer". You can then access all the files on the hard drive.

Sorry Robert, but as I pointed out in the original post, attempting to run as a slave on a Windows machine still causes it to freeze .

I'm not that much of a n00b .

 

[Robert]

Sorry Robert, but as I pointed out in the original post, attempting to run as a slave on a Windows machine still causes it to freeze .

I'm not that much of a n00b .

My bad, somehow I overlooked this sentence " So I set the jumpers to slave and tried plugging it in two other Windows machines and it freezes them upon starting as well."

The other option then would be to to put it into a USB enclosure and connect it to the system after it has started up.

 

[Cam.]

Download BartPE, Burn a disk and then boot of the disk.

 

[bigperm]

All that master/slave ---- is from 98.

If you have a primary hard drive on CS (cable select) and a second on SLAVE, the ide controller will take a crap.

Try putting everything on CS and see what that does.

Also, linux can natively read NTFS, just not write it, but there are solutions to that as well.

 

[krakjoe]

http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-Hard-SA...yZ116258QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

One of those ... I have several disks with the same symptoms, every once in a while I remember something that's on one of them, after a bit of playing around with an ide2usb converter my computer lets me read it for a few minutes at least .... I'd suggest linux because you get more control over hardware, if you can mount it you can dd the entire disk onto a good disk and use linux to dd that file onto a new hd ...

 

[Matt8]

If you get *really* desperate and are willing to ship the device somewhere, I worked for a drive recovery center for a short period of time and still know people that work there. They have On-Track enterprise and a lot of high class [multi-thousand dollar] software. Im still friends with them enough for them to let me sneak in and use the equipment. I couldn't do anything that would require a dust-free room, but I'd be willing to see what I or they could do for you, no cost as long as you pay for shipping.

Just an option if you get desperate enough to toss the drive, I'd love to help.

[just note; the more you try it, the less the chances are going to be that everything will be able to be recovered.]

 

[Decker]

Matt made a good point, stop trying things. With NTFS it's a bit more secure than FAT (Linux systems not sure about overwrites) but any access can adjust the allocation of where things are.

Still going with my first suggestion, due to that, as it doesn't crap out that way.

 

[BananaMaster]

Take out the hard drive get a external hard drive case plug it into another computer and copy your important files to that computer.