How To Recover Files From Hard Disk Crash

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

My desktop computers hard-disk crashed today morning without any warning. The S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics showed perfect health all along. One of the 128 GB partition of a newly purchased Barracuda drive (from Seagate) is not showing any files. In fact whenever I click on it Windows 2000 it is asking me if I want to format it. Even the NTFS is not being recognized.

I tried to recover the files using a freeware tool. The file names are showing but the recovered file doesn’t contain any data.

I would very much appreciate any tools / utilities you can point me to which will help me recover some critical files from the hard-disk crash.

For the next time… there will be no next time. I am purchasing 8 computers to backup everything - 2 for internet connectivity (with hot backup), 2 for file server (RAID 1), 2 for database server (hot backup) and 1 additional for QA and 1 for order processing. As I said there will be no next time :) But this time, I would very much appreciate any guidance.

Discussion

mohan kumar
July 29, 2010: 1:00 pm

Use the safe boot cd like APE CD you can able to retrieve the data.I try and able to recover the whole data from my hard disk

July 20, 2010: 8:13 am

I was trying to remove my hard disk form my desk top computer this morning, I was taking it to a friends place for partitioning. I did not meet my freind so I brought it back, I fixed it and it is no lobger working, What shloud I do to it, I have a feeling that it has crushed and if so how can I rocover my files because they are very important to me.


ADITYA
July 8, 2010: 1:57 pm

i have done formate my hardisk and and lost all data how can i recover it


Gloria
February 5, 2010: 8:32 am

My hard disk cannot be detected by any system, how can I recover my files from the hard disk.


Deborah Wendt
July 23, 2009: 1:44 pm

My computer crahsed and I installed a new hard drive. Now the McAfee antivirus that I had, I no longer have. Do I have to purchase new? Or how can I get it back - since I already paid? Thanks.


Karen
April 25, 2009: 8:57 pm

My hard drive has crashed. Unfortunately, I did not back up for a month and a half. I have a “Clickfree” desktop backup system. I also have a 3rd party program but it did not back the information for this system up for some reason. It is really bad-3 years lost. I need to do anything I can to get the information off my hard drive. My problem is, it is dead. It will not even spin. Does anyone know a way that I can retrieve the information on the drive?


sarah liza lucanas
November 25, 2008: 12:58 am

my hard disk cannot be detected how could i recover my files on my hard disk?


Patrick
April 17, 2008: 6:02 am

Hi!

My hard-disk crashed and now I used the old hard disk as a mobile harddisk after I installed a new harddisk…

How do I recover all my emails and addresses from my Outlook 2007?

I could not do the suggested export, since the harddisk crashed….


Pamela
November 28, 2007: 12:42 pm

SpinRite 6.0 for Windows XP (NTFS),
FAT, Linux, Novell, and ALL OTHER file systems!

Takes anywhere from 12 to 22 hours to run but worth every hour, every minute, every second.

Link: https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

February 13, 2007: 8:57 pm

Thanks for all your ideas. I will try them today and let you know how it goes.


HdWiz

HdWiz

HdWiz
February 13, 2007: 3:15 pm

Buy a cheap usb hard disk (LaCie 250GB or similar) and build a copy of the drive (disk image) on that with a cd bootable linux distro like https://www.sysresccd.org/ . You can build the image with dd_rhelp , https://www.kalysto.org/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html
. After building the image copy that to a new hard disk with simple dd if=imagefile.img of=new_harddisk_device (usually hda or sda) .
You have to rebuild the partition table with gpart or testdisk (www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) . You must recovery the boot sector to boot the system. Start the Windows recovery console from a windows installation cd. Use the fixmbr command to recover the boot sector. Also run chkdsk . I’ve also used BartPE (www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) to run these commands. I’ve been able to recover over 97% of data on 6 hard disks with these methods.
You can also directly “mount” the disk image which you have built with dd_rhelp / dd_rescue in linux using the loop back device. After that you have a choice of copying the files to the usb drive in other directories.

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