Help Please . Hard Disk Crash !

sharkman

Can someone help .

My hard disk has creshed and I need to get my honeymoon snaps off it .

I've run VirtualLab and the files are still there but the drive is not accessable through normal methods .

Is there anyone out there that can help .

Ive contacted a company in Dublin who are looking for €600 to recover the data ..

PLEASE .

Einstein

Calm down take a biiiig deeeeep breath!

What happens when you boot your PC? Black screen? Blue Screen? No screen?

astec123

What do you mean by crashed?
Does it spin up, does it read the drive? Relax for now, take a breath and stay calm, panicing will only make it worse, there are always ways around problems.

ressem

I assume that you placed the dodgy HD drive into a different machine to run VirtualLab.

How much does virtuallab tell you it will charge to recover the data? Or has it failed?

What version of windows was the hard drive running? Using NTFS or FAT32 file system?
What version of windows is installed on the machine, into which you've placed the drive?

Have you access to spare empty hard drive, equal or larger than the damaged one, which could be used to clone all the data, rather than operating off the faulty disk?

Edit
Can you clarify "not accessible in the normal way".
As in was not assigned a drive letter? Assigned a letter, but stalls/fails to read the directory in explorer? Computer bluescreens when trying to access drive?

sharkman

Divers : "What happens when you boot your PC? Black screen? Blue Screen? No screen?"
Windows would not load and prompted me to use recovery mode .

I have since removed the drive and have in another machine .

astec123 : "Does it spin up, does it read the drive?"

No when I try to acces the drive now , it askes me if I wish to Format it .

ressem :

How much does virtuallab tell you it will charge to recover the data? Or has it failed? $299 for 20GB I need twice that .

What version of windows was the hard drive running? Using NTFS or FAT32 file system? Windows Xp on NTFS( I think)
What version of windows is installed on the machine, into which you've placed the drive? Windows XP

Have you access to spare empty hard drive, equal or larger than the damaged one, which could be used to clone all the data, rather than operating off the faulty disk? Sure Do .

Einstein

Which Operating system were you using? you should at least get an option for for safe mode etc...? POssibly even system restore?
The thing is, worst case scenario you could boot to a command prompt and copy all the photos individually to a floppy drive, but photos are big and floppy drives are small...hmmm....

hostyle

Divers wrote:

The thing is, worst case scenario you could boot to a command prompt and copy all the photos individually to a floppy drive

Methinks you haven't been following this thread that well. Do you have attention or reading problems?

Einstein

hostyle wrote:

Methinks you haven't been following this thread that well. Do you have attention or reading problems?

Methinks I possibly don't...however i did mean to say "could you" as opposed to "you could"

ressem

40 GB of vital data?

Ok, can you connect the spare HDD and the dodgy HDD to your workng machine?

You might try a low level read check, using the manufacturer software provided on the net to see whether the issue is with the drive or the NTFS format partition.

Options: 1:
Try to access the drive using a knoppix live CD to read the corrupt NTFS partition.

It it works, format the spare drive as FAT32 and copy over valuable files.

2:
I would suggest trying the RTools demo to see whether it can read the file system from the redundant file table on the system. If it can succeed in recovering a few 64K blocks then it might be worth paying the $50 for the NTFS version.
http://www.r-studio.com/#rstudio_NTFS (which I use without problems)
alternative
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

You can create a disk image and operate the file recovery on that for safety it you've sufficient space.

Others here might have a cheaper recommendation.

Then attempt a full recovery of all the files on the hard drive, most important first. onto the spare drive.

3: If the demo fails then there is software for doing lower level recoveries.

Alternatively if you're based in the midlands, pm, I can run the recovery with the versions I've got.

Rambo

Uneraser
http://www.uneraser.com/

this little program saved me 5G of data like pictures doc and many more
computer repairs wanted 500 euro to recover data from drive
This program cost 35 euro

You will need a empty hard and original hard then you copy bad data to good
drive and you away it does take time
Read instructions before use.

GOOD LUCK