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General discussion

hard drive recovery problem, sort of complex

Mar 26, 2005 5:05AM PST

Ok, this is a big complicated. My system (a 1.6 P4) has two hard drives, both in NTFS format: the master (C) is a 40 gig western digital with Windows 2k Pro on it, and the slave (D) is a 160 gig Maxtor. Earlier in the week the D: drive ceased to be accessible in Windows; it no longer appears in ?My Computer? and cannot be reached through any shortcuts. However, it is still shows up as the Primary slave during startup (good thing, as the C: is obviously configured as a master drive and not a single), as well as in the BIOS and in Windows Device Manager. My power supply died the next day, so I?m assuming that was the culprit, and killed the directory or the partition table or whatever.

I replaced the power supply and tried a few programs, trying to get at the files on D: long enough to at least burn some things. HDD Regenerator supposedly managed to fix a few dozen corrupted sectors, and a program called TestDisk lets me see a list of the files and folders on D:, but no other luck.

My plan (and tell me if you have a better one, please) is to do a complete copy of D: onto another hard drive, in a last ditch effort to save my files. A SeaGate 300 gig arrived in the mail today to serve this purpose, it is currently still in the box, unformatted. My question is?what is the best way to go about this copy? I have a Maxtor Ultra ATA PCI card that I?m not using?should I try and add a third hard drive to an already packed system (I have a DVD drive and a CD burner as well) long enough to perform the copy? Should I temporarily attach the new SeaGate to another computer on my home network? The problem with that is, I imagine I would have to be in Windows to use the network, and the D: is not accessible through Windows (the heart of the problem). If I temporarily take out my current C: and put the new drive in it?s place, could I do the copy without installing Windows? Any other ideas?

Copy program suggestions would also be welcome.

Discussion is locked

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"Ghost is my Favorite"
Mar 26, 2005 5:51AM PST

On all my machines, I use two hard drives. One for the master and one to backup an exact duplicate of the master. I use two detachable trays to hold and extract every thing. Ghost is a bit copier that runs in a Dos enviornment and will copy everything backwards or forward. I can use any of the machines to "Ghost" any disk that I want to by inserting the master and slave in any machine, which I do several times a week. If my master gets corrupted, I can copy from the slave in about 15min. or take the slave, make it master, plug it in and I am good to go. I experiment a lot and this arrangement has saved my soul more than once.

Now your plan is a good one. Use a machine, any machine, plug the one drive in on the master and plug the new drive as slave, then insert a Boot copy of Ghost in the A drive, power up the machine and follow the on screen directions.

I use an old 2002 copy of Ghost.

Norm

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tried ghost...
Mar 26, 2005 7:53AM PST

I've got a copy of Norton Ghost 8.0. I just tried using it, and while it could 'see' the D: drive, but it is greyed out in th menu, unlike the C: drive. It can't make an image of it, or copy it...it says the drive is not partitioned, and so cannot be accessed.

Just formatted the new 300 gig seagate. So I just need to find a copy program that can access the problematic maxtor...

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(NT) (NT) Why not use diskwizard from Seagate
Mar 28, 2005 11:00PM PST
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Data recovery.
Apr 12, 2005 9:21AM PDT

I've seen this many times. Especially with external drives that have lost power while connected to windows.

EasyRecovery DataRecovery can recover the data. It's $200, but it will do it. You can download a trial from the ontrack website that will let you see what files are recoverable before purchasing.

This is the only solution that works that I have experience with.

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Cont
Apr 12, 2005 9:42AM PDT

Ghost won't work because your file system/ partition is lost. Even if you did a sector by sector copy you still wouldn't be able to access the data because Ghost won't seen the file system.

Disk Wizard will not allow you to see or recreate the old file system, just reformat the drive with a new one.

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Result..?
Apr 29, 2005 8:28PM PDT

Hi. Could you please let us know an update of your situation>?
what did you use in the end and what was the result?
I have just had a scare with myE: drive which has about 80G of movies and other things on there, i am right now scanning it in the background with HDD Regenerator. I already have a copy of the program recommended by ontrack so I am armed; just hoping I don't need it!
I would like to know what happened here though so do let us know.

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How do you make a backup?
Apr 29, 2005 10:17PM PDT

A hard disk is temporary storage. If you don't believe it, I'll wait.

Bob

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hope's not lost
May 6, 2005 5:23AM PDT

hi,

i work for a professional data recovery company and have a feeling that while you are copying your data, it may or may not be a success.

try to seek the help of a professional data recovery company who are experts in retrieving data out of corrupted drives.

most data recovery programs are not very expensive, and you could in fact have saved the cost of buying a new hard drive if you had sought help from people like us.

the cost of one our products is less than half of what you spent on the new drive. anyway, there's still hope.

my comapny's website address is http://www.stellarinfo.com

try it out once...