Data Recovery Software

So I have a slight problem with my 300GB drive, for some reason a partition has become unreadable, and I cant read the drive unless it is all allocated and formated. But I cant format it cause it has 40Gb of Digital Pics and home videos. I know I should have backed it up, I did, on Sept of 05...Ouch! I havent since. I also had them backed up on another HD, and last week a friend needed a HD to dump some stuff on cause he had to send his back to maxtor...well I let him borrow it.....and formated it for him, thinking my 1 year old Maxtor will be fine.....Dohh . I have added about 15Gb in the last year. A data recovery company wants 10 hours @137 an hour to retreive it. I dont have the money at this time, so I was looking for an alternative. Anyone know about software and recovery, maybe some material to read over.

Thanks

What were you doing when this happened? (writing data, booting up, reading data, using a particular program...?)

What make of drive is it?

What is the exact error given about by winxp?

First thing I would try is booting into the recovery consol on the winxp boot CD. Then run CHKDSK /R , that might fix things and recover lost data.

I was booting up.... Just installed a fresh copy ox XP Pro a few days earlier....still getting all the little things like flash dl's and things like that. But anyways it booted up and said umm root\system 32\hal.dll was missing or corrupt..... think that was it. I tried the recovery with Xp cd and nothing, I aslo made some xp pr setup floppys from microsoft...and the drive just wouldnt load anymore. So I reformatted the 80 gig and reinstalled again, install went fine and booted up.....but when I open the other drives the 300Gb was not accessable. arghh and that is where I am now. It is a maxtor ^L300SO, no more maxtors for me...I just hope my 100Gb doesnt crash at least till I get another drive!!

http://www.runtime.org/


Used it many times. Just as long as the bios can see the drive, this software will scan the drive and recover anything that hasn't been written over. The software works great.

Any more questions, post them here.


*edit* What do you mean by "not accessible"? Windows doesn't see the drive? Or it shows up in "My Computer", but you can't access it?

It shows up in my computer but I cant access it, wants me to format it.

I Just picked the drive back up from the Data recovery services and they told me the drive has physical sector damage, Im runing GetDataBack to see if i have a chance, so far it has an hour and 15 minutes to go with scanning the drive, If the damage is too bad and I have to make an image, who sells a good HD that is not too expensive that will hold a 300GB Image....argh what a nightmare...

That software will let you see what it's able to recover before making you buy it. I would let the software run it course and then decide what to do from there.

If the software shows what is recoverable, does that mean it WILL be able to recover it or is it another shot in the dark type thing. 28 minutes to go...this website said it takes about an hour for every 50 gigs, why is mine going so fast? because of my processor and the SATA drive.

I have never had it not recover it. However, you may want to contact them before buying it to be sure.

That's just an estimate. Some people get anxious and panic if it takes too long.

I have just done some data recovery over the past week myself on some external hard drives. The best part was it didnt cost a dime and worked like a champ. I used an ubuntu live cd which was able to see what was on the disk when windows couldnt and from there i was able to dump it to another drive. Linux doesnt do well copieing to NTFS so if you have a spare HD you can transfer the files to you can just format that drive as FAT32 and all will be well.

Download for live cd below

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/GetUbuntu/download?action=show&redirect=download

Well I was able to transfer all 40gb of my digital cam pics, now only 250gb to go. However In the middle of the copy I realized that I was not going to have enough room for all the data I was copying over.....sooo I ran to Best Buy, cause I have a gift card and they are alot closer then Fry's and purchased the Best Buy that they had, (I was not buying another Maxtor), and it was a Caviar....so I bought a WD SATA 250 16mb cache...it was 99.00 and I had 25 dollar gift card, so not too bad.

Model # WD2500KSRTL

I guess I will be here the rest of the night copying data over...

Any comments on the new WD drive I got? I have had good luck with WD's

Ill be here a while..

Western Digital makes good drives, more on the noisy side for the most part but i believe that most new hard drives have cut down on the whine and the click click of the disk being accessed that you could hear on the older drives. The drive you got should be good for you. The brand that i have worked with the most and have had the least amount of trouble with has been Seagate and WD drives.

GL on your recovery and for future reference you might want to put down what method you used to get your data back so if someone else with a similar problem views this thread they know exactly what you did to solve it.

Noise is not a problem for me, you can hear my computer across the house at night when it's quiet. LOL All the fans are soo loud. Although my f'd up maxtor can be heard over it..click clunk click...Im waiting for the boom! Well as of know Im still moving data, what a long ordeal, I hope it doesnt boom till Im done gettin my data off. The Get Data Back software was well worth the 80 dollars. Tomorrow I will be spending it burning DVD's, about 40....argh the dvd's I got a while back are only 4x..good thing I have two dvd burners, that will cut time. Ok back to the desktop......

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software try this utility had helped me once I lost the data. Hope it may also provide some help to you.
To try the software download the demo version from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm