harddrive recovery?

Final Fantasy Online Forums > Community Discussion > The Dork Squad

09.02.2011 3:46pm

Thread Creator

Aquila
Usually lurking
Administrator

Wife's laptop recently went boom and has been stuck in safe mode boot loop. Windows recovery disc didn't get too far either. So yesterday I took the harddrive out in attempt to extract the files before reinstalling the OS. I attached the harddrive onto the shell of an external harddrive then connected that to my desktop via USB. While my Windows 7 recognizes there's a new USB device but it won't open it and keeps telling me it needs to be formatted. Any ideas how to fix that?

Thanks!

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09.02.2011 8:15pm

Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you

Were you using a factory restore disc or a Windows 7 install disc?

If you were using the factory restore media, it probably repartitioned the drive, and all easy ways to fix it are now gone. Were I you, I'd go talking to a recovery company. It's not going to be cheap.

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09.03.2011 4:24am

Thread Creator

Aquila
Usually lurking
Administrator

Her laptop is still on Vista. I downloaded the recovery disc online which worked, just not all the way. I physically attached the harddrive to my computer but it didn't even pick it up. Guess I've done all I can and I will take it to shop to see if they can fix it.

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09.03.2011 10:46am

LB
Necromancer of Winning

I assume it sounds good physically? Tried accessing it via dos or linux? If the table's corrupt, one of those file grabber programs? I think somebody used one with a usb drive not to long ago on the old forum.

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09.04.2011 2:32am

Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you

Every recovery disk I've ever seen tended to nuke the partition table and rebuild from there. If someone knew how to rebuild the old partition table, then cheap recovery software might have a chance. But I've never heard of someone doing that.

I tend to sound like a broken record on the subject, but BACKUPS BACKUPS BACKUPS! Data not saved to backup media is data you didn't want in the first place! Buy a cheap external hard drive, and clone your internal drive to a disk image on the external weekly, unplug it, and hide it on the top shelf in your closet when not doing a backup. Your data will thank you.

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09.04.2011 12:40pm

maximus asinus
Registered Member

Even if the partition table is nuked it should be possible to recover all the data should it not? Isn't the partition table's function to establish pathways to each file? As long as he never tried to write data to the drive after he used the recovery CD all files on the HDD should be intact?

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09.04.2011 3:06pm

amaron
No answer, must be that deaf bitch.

<span style="font-size: 11px; color: #959595;"><a href="/forums/profile/17">Southern Comfort</a> said:</span>

Every recovery disk I've ever seen tended to nuke the partition table and rebuild from there. If someone knew how to rebuild the old partition table, then cheap recovery software might have a chance. But I've never heard of someone doing that.

I tend to sound like a broken record on the subject, but BACKUPS BACKUPS BACKUPS! Data not saved to backup media is data you didn't want in the first place! Buy a cheap external hard drive, and clone your internal drive to a disk image on the external weekly, unplug it, and hide it on the top shelf in your closet when not doing a backup. Your data will thank you.

There's also cheap online backup like iDrive where you get 150GB for $5 a month.

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09.04.2011 8:48pm

Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you

<span style="font-size: 11px; color: #959595;"><a href="/forums/profile/42">maximus asinus</a> said:</span>

Even if the partition table is nuked it should be possible to recover all the data should it not? Isn't the partition table's function to establish pathways to each file? As long as he never tried to write data to the drive after he used the recovery CD all files on the HDD should be intact?

You're thinking of the Master File Table. The partition table contains the partition identifiers and the Master Boot Record.

...hm. I don't know if this will work, but you might boot off the recovery disc and see if it'll let you into the Recovery Environment. Then open a command line, use the 'bootrec /FixMbr' command, then see if you can extract files off of it using the USB adapter. YMMV, I'm not at fault if it breaks things further.

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09.05.2011 8:14pm

LB
Necromancer of Winning

I've installed windows onto corrupt hd's before. Just didn't format the drive and was able to recover quite a bit of data. This was a last ditch effort and try at your own risk.

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09.06.2011 7:09am

Arckanghel
Pirate.

I think that if you really want the data back on this one. You take it to a professional now. Anything you do at this point is likely to land you in a different mess, produce a million files to sort, or make things worse.

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