Recovering Data on a Failing Hard Drive

[Stretch]

Gotde T Shirt wrote in news:[email protected]

As you appear to be in the UK, suggest you try:

www.retrodata.co.uk

They've done a couple of recovery jobs for me, successfully and for
relatively affordable fees.

Duncan (aka Odie Ferrous)

aka Odiferous

is associated with Retrodata.

Is Retrodata. A venture he started out of boredom.

[I have no business interest in Retrodata,

other than as an occasional trade customer]

Exactly. So your discount scheme is safe now.

BTW: Don't be upset by Rod's rants, he's from Australia.

So he is your cousin.

 

[Stretch]

Odie Ferrous wrote in news:[email protected]

Matt,

The more you play around with that drive

(which has bad sectors and possibly failing read/write heads)

Yeah, immediately assume the worst. That will scare him witless.

the WORSE you are going to make it.

Not if the bad sectors are logical rather than physical.

Those "strings of numbers" you see are the sector location where bad
media has been located.

Nope, where sectors with bad ECC have been located.
There is no way to tell whether this is a logical or a physical problem un-
less they keep accumulating even when only reads are done to the drive.

Switch the drive off, keep it powered off, and get it to someone who
knows what they are doing.

Spinrite and its ilk are fine if you have a _purely_ logical problem;

Bullshit. Not a clue.

for all other causes of failure, you'd best be buying some snake oil.

I see countless drives come in for recovery that have been obliterated
due to the owner taking advice from another who has absolutely no real
knowlegde of data recovery.

I'll take it that traditional scaremongering still works in the trade.

 

[sachin]

Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.

The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.

Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
explain the situation in more detail:

Causes for Concern:
------------------------------

- I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
as a Master.

- When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
format the drive.

Causes for Optimism:
--------------------------------

- On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
the copying.

- The drive is always detected by the BIOS

- There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.

Going Forward
----------------------

A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
values I can't recall.

My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
likely to be successful.

The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.

Kind Regards,

Matthew Boulton

Hey bro

Try to get hold of this software"Dead Disk Doctor" Its free from
internet. If you need a crack search for it. Thos happened to me once
and I managed to recover my data using "Dead disk doctor". There is a
high possibility it will work. Let me know the outcomes

cheers!!!

 

[Pennywise]

On 1 June 2003 driving uninsured became an offence for which, instead of
prosecution, a fixed penalty could be offered. The level of the fixed
penalty was set at £200 plus 6 penalty points."

The vehicle can also be confiscated and crushed.

Child support, I didn't know from one week to the other if I had a
valid driving license.

Pulled over one day and I didn't - they impounded (confiscated) the
car, to storage for a month whose fee would come to $1000.

I paid a $1000 for the car so just never picked it up, the law was
found to be invalid as it was double jeopardy.