Recover Data

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Hi I cannot access my hard drive neither can it boot up, its Windows XP SP2.

Started when I shut it down by holding power button, & manually shutting down.

Its visible in Windows Disk Management & My
Computer. But is inaccessible.

Disk Management shows it as Healthy (Active) but under File System nothing
is listed.

When I try to do a repair via Windows Installation it recognises the
partition but next to it is written (Uknown)

Please advise how to retrieve info.

Thanks
 
Hi,

My advice: Take it to a reputable shop. What you likely have is either a
drive geometry problem or a corrupted file system. The first can often be
recovered by disk editing tools like mbrwork from terabyteunlimited.com, the
latter may possibly be recovered by running chkdsk, but before either are
done I would strongly recommend that the drive be imaged. If you are
comfortable with these operations, then proceed but otherwise I would
recommend a professional (who, by the way, will likely not guarantee against
loss of data, they just have a better chance of recovery than a casual
user).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
I am an IT Consultant (Microsoft Registered Member), just not very
experienced with Data Recovery or experienced this kind of problem. For
future reference the drive is not accessible via my computer or disk
management, it showed active healthy but file system was not noted
(unrecognisable & probably the issue itself). How would a chkdsk be possible
in this instance or an image (never did imaging although have Norton Ghost)


However now the problem is that I have taken it to a reputable software
recovery to no avail. Now the drive is not visible in my computer, only in
disk management unintialized. Meaning there no partition. What to do need
data from it, would a low format be possible & recover data or something
else, please advise.

Is it possible to recover data when no partition is possible?

Thanks
 
Hi,

Ugh. I would use mbrwork from terabyteunlimited (in the free utilities) to
try to recover the partition information. Whomever you took it to should
have at least imaged the drive first, you may want to ask them what steps
were taken and what conclusions they drew. Any further attempts to correct
the drive file system, like chkdsk, will only make things worse (low level
formatting would result in permanent data loss).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
How to use the mbrwork get it downloaded. Trying to use it from within
Windows but says something about application trying to access hard disk. Is
this program suppose to work solely from DOS?

Thanks

Have used Stella Phoenix,Active Undelete,File Scavenger to no avail, the
software has worked with other hard drives I have with partitions that were
deleted & repartitioned with new Windows, they picked up files from previous
partitioning.

But not with this drive.
 
Mbrwork runs from a bootable floppy, check the included readme file for
available functions.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
Back
Top