drive crash -> broken directory ?

[JOHolloway]

WinXP Home on a new Dell

The drive crashed, such that on boot it hangs at the logo forever. I
booted from a Knoppix CD (wow, very cool) and got most of my files that
way.

There remain some files under the My Documents folder, even though it
appears empty. I know they're there, but I can't see them, not via any
explorer-type window nor command line. I tried both via Knoppix and
via "slaving" the drive on another PC.

The odd thing is that if I type in a sub-dir name, such as ..\My
Documents\Music, I see my music files and am able to copy them out.
However, other folders (again, I know they're there) can't be reached,
such as ..\My Documents\Projects.

What's going on? Why can't I get to those other folders (and thus
those other files)?

After peeling off the files I could find, I tried to re-install
Windows. The formatting hung at 4%, and Dell sent me another drive. I
would still like to get the remaining files off the old drive (the
formatting got nowhere, so the files are still there, I figure).

My guess is that the drive crashed up near the front and chunked up
whatever data structure is used to store file/folder names and their
pointers. Is there a way to peel all files off a drive, even when
their addresses are essentially unknown?

Any advice would be much appreciated. TIA

 

[Chris Priede]

Hi,

My guess is that the drive crashed up near the front and
chunked up whatever data structure is used to store
file/folder names and their pointers. Is there a way to
peel all files off a drive even when their addresses are
essentially unknown?

Your attempt to format the drive may have diminished the possibility of
retrieval greatly, although it's a Good Thing the formatting did not
complete. At this point, I would suggest you boot Knoppix as you did
before. Verify that you can still see all the things you could see on it
before, then proceed as follows:

a) If not (formatting ate it all) or if the data is highly valuable and you
would be willing to pay for it -- send it to a professional data recovery
service. If you choose to do that, don't try anything else. Any changes to
the drive could complicate recovery further.

b) If you still see files on it and you know you won't be spending the money
to have it recovered professionally, then I'd try using the drive
manufacturer's diagnostic utilities to test and non-destructively repair any
bad sectors, followed by chkdsk /f while having it installed as a secondary
drive in a Windows XP system.

Just a few bad sectors is the most common mode of drive failure. Having
developed any in the directory structures would cause precisely the symptoms
you describe (hanging, inaccessible directories). If you can get these
remapped, drive access will no longer hang and chkdsk /f should be able to
repair most filesystem corruption.

The ability of the drive manufacturers' tools to remap bad sectors
successfully varies, but some of them are pretty good at it. I've had good
success doing this with WD (which Dell often uses) Data Lifeguard Tools and
IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test.