Swapping controller boards, need a bit of guidance and a question answered.

Alright I have two of the exact same drive in this case 30GB Western Digital's IDE based. Now, a few nights ago, I got awakened to a loud grinding spinning noise which I know all too well from SCSI drives of death days to be a drive on it's last leg. After some detection work I found it to be my server was the culprit which has two 30's a 60 and a 7GB for OS in it.

After figuring which drive was wailing like a banshee I went out and got a 160GB WD to put the data over to, got the data cut and pasted (First mistake there) shut the rig down and rebooted, and it was seeing the 160 as a removable drive, I had hooked it up in the chain with the other 30. Well after some investigation work I found that the 30 was causing me the issues, narrowed it down to a bad controller, it wouldn't even boot with the drive connected to a controller card individually.

Boot into 2000 Server, and what do I see on my 160GB... Nothing, it read as a fresh hard drive GRRR! First things first I put a signature on it and once again quick formatted the drive and got it online. Plug the noisy 30 back in and then proceed to use Restorer on it and get a recovery of most of the data problem is it's all truncated filenames and pretty much useless so first question of the day on that. Anyone know a good file recovery prog with 100% data recovery on a Cut and Pasted drive?

Moving on to the 30 with the bad controller this is where my major dilema comes in this drive contained 7 years with of CD's ripped from all my Dj collections. It's imperative that I recover the data from this drive, I swapped controller boards and was able to get this drive to boot, problem is it reads just like the 160 did, BLANK like it's never been used and has no partition table info on it at all. How do I go about recovering the data from this drive and putting it to sleep ?

I need help guys, any and all the help I can get. It's all appreciated, If I lose all that data I would seriously be on the verge of tears some of it is CD's I can't even replace anymore

J

It's really hard to say when you've got a faulty controller thrown into the mix. I'm positive a professional data recovery service could help you, but I don't know if any commonly available drive-recovery software can. In most cases like this, you just have to try something and see what it can recover. I know this isn't answering your question, but I'm not sure it can be answered with any degree of confidence from afar.

Well I know a professional place could do it pretty easily -- we had a dead drive here with important data, I think they charged $200 to look at it, and then $4 to send the data back on CD. NOT SURE if the $200 included the recover -- I think it does though, if it's a simple fix.

In your case, it sounds like a simple fix. In our case, the drive had a bad onboard controller board, as it would not recognize in any BIOS. The data was all retrieved. In your case, I think they can take care of your situtiaon as easily.

Hopefully others can lend a hand in getting the data off without paying an outside company, unfortunately thats about all the insight I can give.

PS Have you tried looking at the drive in something like Knoppix STD and see what it sees on it?

Try cooling it off, then mounting the drive upside down. Often will keep it working long enough for a recovery. Set HDD spindowns to NO while you do this, if it spins down it might not spin up again. (That's half of what kills some of them in the first place anyway)

regards,

Road Warrior

I will second looking at it in Knoppix. That has saved my butt a few times when windows saw the drive as empty

I use "GetDataBack" from http://www.runtime.org/ I've been able to recover data from some pretty corrupted drives with it. But, it costs $80. A free one however is PC File Inspector, which I've also used with not quite as good results. http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm If the drive really is on it's last legs, I don't know if I'd risk running either, as the addtional strain on the drive might end up being the final nail it it's coffin. Turning the drive upside down or even sideways might gain you some addtional time to try and recover something before you're looking at professional data recovery.

I know several people who have used R-studio with excellent results.

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

It will allow imaging the drive first(provided the hardware is still functional). Then working with the imaged drive, attempt to recover the files.

I second David's advice about Knoppix, saved me as well many a time with people's computers I have fixed. Probably because you don't access the drive and it doesn't run till Knoppix tells it to. That coupled with Road Warriors advice might be worth a shot before taking it to a professional.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I went with CrystalMethod and RHM's advice and picked up GetDataBack for FAT, and I have to say that aside from a long wait as it restructures the drive, it works flawlessly and recovered all the data from one drive. The other drive will be a bit of a challenge seeing that I did a "cut" and paste of the data off of it, going to take a bit more thinking to figure out how to restore it getting the folder names and etc back to how they should be.

J I'll keep you all posted.