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General discussion

Precious Hard Drive Dying - Help!

Feb 22, 2011 1:19AM PST

I've been a stupid idiot. I was getting lazy on backing up, and now the grim reaper is hanging over my hard drive. It's full of valuable photos and documents my family doesn't want to lose. But I also don't think I need to spend a fortune on sending it out for professional recovery because it is mechanically still working but previously had many bad sectors on it. It wasn't making any funny noises as far as I can tell.


Here's what I've done:

I have an old Maxtor 40gb hard drive with 3 partitions: 2 Linux and 1 Windows XP NTFS (my boot partition). Last year when I booted I got "Disk Error". When I try to run CHKDSK, it stops at 33% and says "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." Oh man!

I took the hard drive out, put it in a Linux computer as a slave. I can see all 3 partitions. I can access the files in the Linux partitions, but it won't mount the Windows NTFS partition and says I "should run CHKDSK on it". Great. Then I tried using TestDisk on the old hard drive. TestDisk finds the NTFS partition but says something like "File system damaged" and gives up.


What do I do?

I'm thinking I should copy the entire contents of the disk to an external hard drive ASAP using dd_rescue then try to work with the external hard drive. But truth is I don't know what I'm doing. Does "dd_rescue" copy the disk to an iso file? If so how do I perform recovery on an iso file in Windows?

People have recommended Spin Rite but I don't feel comfortable with making a dying or damaged hard drive do more work. Should I ship-off the hard drive for $$ recovery or should I make a disk image copy first? Also, do file recovery programs directory structures?

Seriously, I don't really know what else to do to rescue my data, any suggestions?

Discussion is locked

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Try...
Feb 23, 2011 1:01PM PST

Read the 1st post or sticky here on forum for remedies.

-OR- Install a new HD(need one anyways?) or one not the old one, Make the new HD bootable by installing one OS(windoze). Once all that is done, then mount the old HD or install in ext. USB case or adapter to access. That way, provided the files are present you can recover what you can. If besktop PC mount as 2nd HD, use proper connection. At that time don't do anymore recovery s/w, just get the data you need it will seen. If not seen or is truly corrupted, then try the recovery s/w and give it the time it needs. You may want to try the chkdsk /r command.

http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f10/chkdsk-r-or-chkdsk-r-f-208645.html

Of course, you can use the data recovery services for some cost.

tada -----Willy Happy

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Already tried...
Feb 23, 2011 9:50PM PST

Sorry I didn't mention this but I've read through the 1st sticky post before posting. Also, if you read my post you would see that I've already done all your recommendations except for the use of data recovery s/w.

I'm still wondering about my other questions, such as if I use data recovery s/w will be able to know what directories files belonged to and when they were created? And whether I should do recovery on the copied portion of the disk, whether it's safe to copy and recover rather than shipping it out for data recovery, what the copy dd_rescue creates looks like (whether it's an iso, a file, or a true image), etc.?