Help - I lost all my photos/files from my Ex Hard Drive

sloppydex

Hey - I lost all my files from a seagate ex hd (it fell over). The ex hd now does not show up on my laptop and makes a squeaky noise...i have all my college photography work on this along with other important stuff...

Has this happened to anyone and you managed to get the files recovered? if so how or can you please point me in the right direction...is there someone i can contact or are those data recovery places any good.....

id appreciate any help. thanks....

* before it went completely it said "delayed write failure"...

zero86r

It sounds like a mechanical failure, i don't think you can recover data from a physical problem

sloppydex

oh jesus...that bad...thanks anyhow

sloppydex

actually before it went altogether it kept saying - delayed write failure....

pixbyjohn

Ontrack in UK might be able to help but can be expensive, but for around 100euro they will look at it and tell you if files can be recovered. They have a pickup office in Dublin. I will look for phone number if you are interested
Please don't keep trying the drive cos it only makes things worse

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.ie/

Wibbler

OP Sorry to hear about your troubles. It's sounds like a failed bearing or worse, the disk heads contacting the drive platters. I'd recommend not powering up the drive in case you damage it further. Have a data recovery company diagnose the problem. As mentioned above, recovery if possible is likely to be expensive.

I've had external drive failures where it was actually the enclosure that failed. I was able to access the data by transferring the disk into another enclosure. They are mostly standard SATA drives these days. I would normally recommend trying that, but the sqeaking noise that you mention make it more likely to be a mechanical problem with the disk itself.

Best of luck, I really do hope it works out for you.

Ghost Train

Have used this dublin company before for a phyically dead drive, no life from it
http://www.datarecovery.ie

cost for recovery of one drive was over a thousand euro, but depending on type of failure i guess this could vary, website says 95€ for diagnostic of drive

spinrite is software that does its best to recover a damaged drive by working on the drive at a pretty basic level and can fix a drive for long enough to recover your data, it 90$ and if it doesnt work or your unhappy with it you can get a refund within 30 days

best freeware I've found to work on a drive thats currupt is http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1
just runs in windows, may need to quickformat the drive so it can access the drive to run the recovery

CabanSail

I think this thread may be better in the Computers & Technology forum. They will know more about HDD Recovery than us.

I will move it over there. If it's not appropriate feel free to move it back.

ressem

Depends on the value of the data to you.
If you think that you value the data in the high hundreds of euros then you might want to consider going directly to the datarecovery crowd.

The alternative...

If you are / have access to a friendly technically minded person with computer they can leave working on your data for a day or so...

my preferred approach at the moment is to
1. get a second larger external USB drive, (to hold a clone of any data recovered)
2 a small usb key (to hold data recovery log files)
3 a linux live cd with gddrescue, Ubuntu will do if you've got a network connection. You can allow universal packages then apt-get install gddrescue.
4 your data recovery software (I use ufs explorer on windows, but no harm trying other recommendations on the cloned copy of your data.)

Connect the two usb drives and usb key to the laptop.
Boot from the live cd into linux, without modifying the computer.
Run gddrescue to clone old hard disk 1 to new hard disk 2, storing the log file on usb key. Take great care to make sure you don't put the drives in the wrong order when cloning.

Ddrescue will attempt to step around any damaged sectors and copy the rest.
When finished the new disk will contain a clone of data that it found.
The log file on the usb key will contain a list of the sectors that it failed to copy.
This can be parsed into an NFI compatible format using scripts from
http://www.burtonsys.com/downloads.html
ddr2sr.zip
Microsoft's NFI (NTFS File Sector Information Utility) can then tell you the files which are affected by sector loss.


As the new drive doesn't have the mechanical faults of the old drive there is a high probability that the automatic or manual chkdisk after connecting the new disk to a windows PC will allow the majority of files to be recovered.
If you want to use other tools to try and recover files without letting windows chkdisk try first, then you need to temporarily disable the autocheck on the PC you're using for the diagnostics by changing a registry key.

http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-vista/how-to-disable-check-disk-chkdsk-at-startup-in-vista/

In theory you can also use this log to feed commands to spinrite so it doesn't spend a fortnight examining the entire disk. But I've not had much luck with spinrite.

sloppydex

thanks all - alot to take in and digest, i appreciate it.

gman2k

I used a program before called unstoppable copy, which let me recover 95% of data from a damaged hard disk.
Luckily, I was able to see the disk on 'my computer', and it would spin up.
I remember when I dropped it on a footpath, and watched it bounce in slow motion!