best data recovery procedure?

[Al Dykes]

Have a 200 gig data drive, ntfs, one partition.
Somehow it has got in trouble. Explorer says "X is not accessible. The
file or directory is corrupted or unreadable."
Rebooted & now it has lost it's label & says "Local Disk" & "the disk
is drive x is not formatted."
Any suggestions as to what is the best procedure or utility to try &
recover is much appreciated.

Was this an external (USB/FW) drive or internal. Just curious.

 

[Rod Speed]

Have a 200 gig data drive, ntfs, one partition.
Somehow it has got in trouble. Explorer says "X is not accessible.
The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable."
Rebooted & now it has lost it's label & says "Local Disk"
& "the disk is drive x is not formatted."

Any suggestions as to what is the best procedure
or utility to try & recover is much appreciated.

Forensically clone the drive, then try the various recovery apps
like Easy Recovery Pro and GetDataBack etc on the clone.

It's on a Promise Ultra IDE controller

Worth trying it on one of the motherboard controllers too.
Its quite possible that its the Promise controller that's failed.

 

[DonLogan]

Have a 200 gig data drive, ntfs, one partition.
Somehow it has got in trouble. Explorer says "X is not accessible. The
file or directory is corrupted or unreadable."
Rebooted & now it has lost it's label & says "Local Disk" & "the disk
is drive x is not formatted."
Any suggestions as to what is the best procedure or utility to try &
recover is much appreciated.

 

[DonLogan]

Was this an external (USB/FW) drive or internal. Just curious.

It's on a Promise Ultra IDE controller

 

[Arno Wagner]

Have a 200 gig data drive, ntfs, one partition.
Somehow it has got in trouble. Explorer says "X is not accessible. The
file or directory is corrupted or unreadable."
Rebooted & now it has lost it's label & says "Local Disk" & "the disk
is drive x is not formatted."
Any suggestions as to what is the best procedure or utility to try &
recover is much appreciated.

Whatever you do, make a sector-wise copy first and then work on that.

Arno

 

[rick]

Forensically clone the drive, then try the various recovery apps
like Easy Recovery Pro and GetDataBack etc on the clone.

Can you describe how to "forensically clone" a drive?

I have a Seagate that I want to sector-copy to a matching
Seagate drive.

TIA

Rick

 

[Rod Speed]

Can you describe how to "forensically clone" a drive?

I have a Seagate that I want to sector-copy to a matching
Seagate drive.

TIA

Rick

 

[Rod Speed]

Can you describe how to "forensically clone" a drive?

Use an app that does that.

I have a Seagate that I want to sector-copy
to a matching Seagate drive.

If the original doesnt have any hardware problems, any cloner that can do
a sector copy will be fine. Examples are Ghost 2003, Ghost32.exe etc.

If the source drive has hardware problems, you want to use a cloner
that will minimise how much it bashes on the drive to maximise the chances
of getting what can be copied off the drive before it dies completely.
An example is clonedisk
http://www.invircible.com/resq.php

 

[rick]

completely. An example is clonedisk
http://www.invircible.com/resq.php

Thanks

Rick

 

[wemaole]

I suggest you use data recovery software such as EASEUS Data Recovery
Wizard to recover files.

Download demo version: http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

You can use "AdvancedRecovery" to scan your corrupted partition. After
the scan is complete, the lost file will be displayed in Data Recovery
Wizard, you can select them and recover them.

 

[DonLogan]

Forensically clone the drive, then try the various recovery apps
like Easy Recovery Pro and GetDataBack etc on the clone.


Worth trying it on one of the motherboard controllers too.
Its quite possible that its the Promise controller that's failed.

Update (know Rod likes them, add to the knowledge pool)

Still playing with this drive. All the recovery apps I've tried only
see a 31.5 gig partition, including XP computer management/disk
management. It doesn't look like they are overcoming this & looking at
the whole 200 gigs (was one partition). So I'm not getting as many
files as I should.

Best program so far is File Scavenger. It recovered about 65,000
files, of which approx 7,000 are corrupt & won't open.
Getdataback found about 1,900 files. Don't know how many were valid.
Both ran for about an hour.
Data Recovery Wizard saw the 32.5 but also had an option to file scan
the whole 186 gig ntfs. Took 10.5 hours, then fell over!

Would be good if there was a disk/partition repair app, then the
others might function better.

 

[Rod Speed]

Update (know Rod likes them, add to the knowledge pool)

Yes please.

Still playing with this drive. All the recovery apps
I've tried only see a 31.5 gig partition, including
XP computer management/disk management.

Thats odd. Looks like something has screwed
the partition table or something. Try
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm

It doesn't look like they are overcoming this &
looking at the whole 200 gigs (was one partition).
So I'm not getting as many files as I should.

Best program so far is File Scavenger. It recovered about
65,000 files, of which approx 7,000 are corrupt & won't open.

Is that 65K what you'd expect in a 32G partition ?

Getdataback found about 1,900 files. Don't know
how many were valid. Both ran for about an hour.

Interesting difference.

Data Recovery Wizard saw the 32.5 but also had an option to file
scan the whole 186 gig ntfs. Took 10.5 hours, then fell over!
Damn.

Would be good if there was a disk/partition repair
app, then the others might function better.

Yeah, see above.

 

[DonLogan]

Yes please.


Thats odd. Looks like something has screwed
the partition table or something. Try
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm

tried the demo. it said chance of recovery "poor". think i'll suck it
up and move on.

Is that 65K what you'd expect in a 32G partition ?

Not sure I can answer this. File sizes were all over the place & it
was only half full.

Interesting difference.


Yeah, see above.

thanks all for the help