How I got data from my broken hard disk (part 3)
In my two previous posts I have described how my WD hard disk has stopped working and has shown junk folders and how I tried to make backup and use boot CD’s to fix the disk after chkdsk has told me that “The specified disk appears to be a non-Windows XP disk”. In this post I’ll give you the solution that has helped for me.
So this was the situation: my data is gone, the disk causes Windows to boot slower and Windows don’t recognize the disk. Pretty frustrating, don’t you agree?
I have decided to play with master boot record. I have downloaded MBR Fix and have fixed a MBR. Well, that worked fast and I got my disk back again: of course empty with none of my files present. The weird thing was that the free space was not reported correctly – it has still shown only the free space that I had before the crash, not the whole disk. So could there still be hope?
I have run some undelete utilities but they froze my computer every time, making the screen show only tiles. I gave up for a few days and let the disk a rest. I have tried writing to disk and this time it worked, So I guess a rest did god to the drive.
After some time I have tries with some low level disk rescue utilities. Sometimes the system crashed, sometimes it didn’t. I still don’t know what has caused that. I tried Recuva and Restoration, but both with not enough success. I finally tried GetDataBack for FAT 4.0 and it seemed promising. The systems crashed a few times, specially when I started a manual test. I have used it to shorten the test and run the program only on a percentage of the drive because the tests took long time to run.
I decided to run the test for the whole drive and spare a few days with my computer on. The program did manage to find a lot of folders and files many times. Unlike the previous softwares I tried, the content of the files looked ok and corrupted. So I gave it a try for a full scan of the whole 320 GB. I guess I was lucky because the system didn’t crash the last time I tried it. The program found many folders and files and for most of the it could also find heir names (for around 100 folders and some files it couldn’t though). It also found most of the directory structure. So this was great news – the files could be found! The big question was whether they could be recovered, that is coped to a new drive before disappearing again.
I have selected all the files and started copying them to the external drive. The process was surprisingly fast in regards to the previous drive slowness. For the whole 250 GB of data there were only three errors during the restoration. Most of the data was successfully copied and so far I thing it’s also structurally complete. I have tested some zip files, movies, mp3s and text files and they seem 100% accurate. Nice!
After my data was safe I still wondered if the disk is broken or not. Apparently not I could get all the data from it? I have decided to format it with Windows formatter (this time to NTFS), but to my surprise the format failed. I will try it to FAT again, but I suspect it will fail too.
Next I will try some special formatter software and will report here if I find something interesting. I won’t however, trust this disk important data for at least long time.
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How I got data from my broken hard disk (part 2)
In my previous post I have described how my WD hard disk has stopped working and has shown junk folders instead of empty space. Windows decided that “The specified disk appears to be a non-Windows XP disk” so I could do nothing with it. In this post I’ll describe what I did to start rescuing data.
First I have tried just to delete the junk folders. It didn’t work. Also, I have tries to create a new folder, and it didn’t work either. I guessed there were something wrong with the disk, so I downloaded “Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows” from the WD site. First I have run the quick SMART test and it came through fine with no errors. I have decided to run the extended test and it surprised me that the test would take 30 hours to complete. I was skeptical about the estimate, but left the test to run anyway and left for my office.
When I returned back home after some hours, the computer didn’t respond, so I had to restart it. Again I have noticed that the boot took much longer. I have tried to run the extended test again, and after some minutes it froze my computer, leaving the screen with a tiled pattern. I tried the same for a few times, and every time the same happened, but at different percentage complete. Once I even ran the quick SMART test again and this time it failed with two errors, one of them being something wrong with the disk heads. I decided it’s time to make backup of the files on the disk, so I started copying content to the external disk.
Unfortunately it was too late. The disk was very slow, and at some point copying started to give me read errors so I couldn’t continue. Frustrated I have decided to try to fix a disk with some special disk utilities from a boot CD.
I have created several bood CDs (Ultimate boot CD and Hiren’s boot CD). They have had similar utilities on them. I have tried some, but each of them crashed my computer the same way WD tool did: by freezing it and showing weird tiles on the screens.
When I returned to Windows, the disk was not recognized any more, so I couldn’t continue copying files. So I was left with a disk that caused slow Windows boot-up and was not recognized by Windows. Funny, but at the time it was not – beside this some my data was on the disk as well.
I gave up on the disk and the data. I was thinking on just how to remove it so my system would work optimal again. However, I still didn’t know what has happened so I couldn’t just leave it at that. If my data was gone, I could as well play with the disk even if I brake it.
Next the solution: Read part 3: what helped to get the data back.
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How I got data from my broken hard disk (part 1)
It’s almost funny. My last post was about getting lost photos from drives and memory cards. Well, it turned out that just in the week after publishing the post my (secondary, non-system) hard drive started to act strange. It is an older 320 GB Western Digital drive that I bought with my previous computer and have carried it with the data to my newer one which I still use now. So what was the matter with my drive?
My computer stopped responding. I have restarted it, and when I did, the Checkdisk started automatically. Nothing unusual until now. Checkdisk found a weird error:
The specified disk appears to be a non-Windows XP disk.
I haven’t seen this error yet and my later web search did not bring many results either. Well, the weird thing was this:
Do you want to continue?(Y/N): No
It appeared that Chkdsk decided not to continue because of the error. So I have decided to wait for the computer to boot up and run Chkdisk again. Well, after the computer was ready, the drive was apparently not. When I opened the Explorer, the disk contained a lot of junk folders with weird names. I have checked to see if my folders were still there, and they were. Also the including files. So I didn’t make a lot of this error – probably just some folder structure corrupted that Chkdsk will fix. So I didn’t make a backup copy, which turned out to be a mistake.
I rerun chkdsk, knowing that it will notify me that it will continue after the restart. It did, but again it has shown the error that the disk is not XP disk. And again, answered “No” to the question if it should continue. After boot (please note that boot took much more time to complete than usual) I took a look at the disk and it still had all the data – mine and the corrupted.
I figured out that I should take more time to fix this. I didn’t have time, so I postponed the disk and data rescue. My computer worked ok, I could live without the disk, but boot times were much slower.
The solution: Read what I did later and how I finally managed to save my data in my next post.
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