Data Recovery after a hard drive failure

[agg_99]

Howdy All,

I'm having a strange issue on a hard drive and I wanted to see if anybody else has every had this happen.

I have a one year old 64 bit AMD I built which had a 200GB Maxtor in it. Last week, I got another 200GB Maxtor and went to add it. When I went in to run the Maxtor tool to set it up, it did recognize the new hard drive as did the BIOS. Maxtor asked me if I wanted it to set up the new drive for use. I of course said yes. Here's where it goes weird. It proceeded to run and then encountered an error a few minutes later which is said was related to hardware.

I rebooted the machine and it hung on Verifying the DMI Pool Data. After disconnecting the drive, playing with the BIOS, etc. it was still hanging. That's when I figured something got hosed on my primary. I took it out and re-installed windows on my new drive. Once it was up, I made my old primary a slave and went to look at it to see what the damage was. Windows didn't even recognize it as a formatted drive. Apparently the Maxtor app got confused when it went to set up the drive and started formatting my primary. It never even gave me an option.

Anyway, I figure the primary was screwed and started looking into data recovery software. I had some rather large AVI files on there which were digital camcorder files from my son's first year. I hadn't had time to burn them onto DVD. I've tried a few tools so far such as GetDataBack for NTFS, Recover My Files Data Recovery 3.9, and BinaryBiz VirtualLab 5.0. None of them could recover the AVI without it being corrupt. BinaryBiz did show something interesting though. It should that the hard drive now has 6 partitions (4 NTFS and 2 FAT). Some of those AVIs were high quality so they can range from 6 GB to 13 GB. I'm pretty sure they are split among those partitions.

Sorry for the long post. Just wanted to know if anybody has any recommendations for software I can try. The only other option I have is data recovery service which I don't want to shell out $2k for. Thanks everybody.

[doctorgonzo]

I've never used either of these, but they have been recommended before:

SpinRite
Ontrack Data Recovery (has a trial version that lets you see what it can recover).

Just a question, what were you using the Maxtor tool to do? Were you cloning the old hard drive to the new one?

[agg_99]

Thanks for the recommend. I'll give those a try.

I was going to use it to set-up and partition the hard drive. I would have used Windows to just format it but with it connected, it encountered an error on boot up. I had never added additional storage before so this was new to me. When going through Max Blast 4, it appeared to be working perfectly until the hardware error. It probably going to turn into an expensive lesson learned although from what I have been reading online, I don't even think data recovery services could do much on large, fragmented files.

[doctorgonzo]

You don't have to use the Maxtor tool if you simply want to partition and format; you can do that in Windows. It's strange that you got an error when it was connected. It should not have done that. If the new drive is a PATA/IDE drive, it may have been jumpered wrong or something.

At least Ontrack has the free version that will let you see if it can recover anything, so definitely give that a try.

[agg_99]

I would have thought so too. The drives were jumpered properly according to the maxtor specs so I figured it should be smooth sailing. I'll try those tonight and let you know how it goes. Thanks again

[agg_99]

Well no good news. I tried Ontrack Data Recovery and it has the same problem some of the other tools are having. For some reason it is only recognizing that one partition of 33GB exists on the drive. It is not even bothering to scan the rest of the disk. I checked around on SpinRite and didn't see a free trial but the reviews look good. That might be a last resort thing to maybe buy the basic version of it.

[glc]

Are you sure you didn't set the cylinder limitation jumper by mistake? That's gonna make it look like a 32gb drive.

[agg_99]

I think it is set by mistake. After it had failed and we reinstalled Windows on my other one, I had tried booting it with the problem drive as a slave but without the jumper on it and hung at Verifying DMI Pool. When I put the jumper on it in the slave position, it booted just fine. My primary had the jumper set as master so that one was fine. I'll try it again with no jumper on the slave or as cable select and see if that will work. Thanks alot. I had never run into that limitation issue before. That might open up a few other tools which were not reading past the limit. Thanks again.

[agg_99]

GREAT NEWS!!! It worked. Once I corrected the jumper, all the tools I had used before recognized the full hard drive. I then just used GetDataBack and it recovered all files in perfect condition. Thanks for all the help everybody. It was very much appreciated!!!!

[terrytree]

hi,
yes, you can recover the data provided they werent overwritten. do not write anything to the partition, or better, dont access it at all.

EASEUS DataRecoveryWizard is a good one. the trial version will show you what are recoverable...
http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

[glc]

Terry, the issue was solved 2 weeks ago.

You know - this is your second post on these forums. Your first one was exactly the same - and also after the fact. If your third post is the same, I can only conclude that you are spamming the board to try to sell this software and I will ban you.

- Admin -

[nosefirst]

Why not get Ghost and use your 2nd drive as the recovery point if you have important files to protect? I'm not necessarily pluging it. Actually I havn't had to use mine to recover anything yet.

I had some problems getting my rig just right and ended up reformating & reinstalling. Fortunatly I had my business backed up on a dvd.

Theoretically it should be just a matter of minutes instead of hours recovering from catastrophic failure.

Those hours are worth a lot to me, much more than I paid for Ghost.