Help With Crashed? Hard Drive

Hi. I have a 1TB SATA drive that crashed (or lost sectors) and we are trying to get our data from (just MY DOCUMENTS and PICTURES). I can slave the device to another machine and "see it" using Spinrite, but when I try to recover it with Spinrite I receive a DIVISION OVERFLOW ERROR on the 4th sector and cannot get past that point. Spinrite sees 3 partitions on the drive and 2 of them are fine (I suspect these are the restore points and another factory partition), but the main, large partition cannot be restored due to that error.

The SeaTools software finds the error and claims to fix it during the LONG TEST, but the SHORT TEST continues to fail and we still cannot get to any real data on the drive.

If I just try to mount it in Windows, the computer cannot do so -- the error is "The disk in drive X is not formatted". (I can mount a small section of it that Windows logs as a different drive letter, I suspect this is that restore point partition).

Is it possible the problem is a missing boot sector and, if so, is there any software available to restore same? Else, is there software available to format the hard drive without losing the data on it (not sure if that is possible or not), or go past the point it's crashing and recover other data on it?

The driver is a Seagate Barracuda 1000GB

Thank you in advance.

 

TestDisk would be my first choice, it should be able to recreate your drive volumes/partitions.

 

If you really want that data, the first rule of data recovery is don't do anything that writes on the failing drive. It only makes things worse!
Get another 1TB drive, hook the bad and replacement drives to a PC that works, then use a sector by sector cloning utility ( http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=22 ( Make sure you choose the physical drives, not the logical volumes )), copy the failing drive to the replacement, and then try CHKDSK (without the /F, first!), Spinrite or, far better, GetDataBack ( https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm ) to recover the folders you want. The key idea is to work on a copy that does not have a hardware problem.

 

Thank you for both recommendations. I will have to try the GetDataBack software.
I did, however, DL and am running the TestDisk software. I have not written to the drive ... have it slaved to a machine with a good HD.
What TestDisk is finding as I write this is the following:

Disk /dev/sdb - 1000GB / 931 GiB - CHS 129201 240 63
Analyse cylinder 44481/129200: 34%
Read error at 2999/30/53 (lba=45346822)

Warning: Number of Heads/Cylinder mismatches 255 (FAT) ! = 240 (HD)
Fat16 > 32M 0 1 1 5 74 63 80262 [Dell Utility]
Warning: Number of Heads/Cylinder mismatches 255 (NTFS) ! = 240 (HD)
HPFS - NTFS 5 100 21 2580 206 14 38940672
Warning: Number of Heads/Cylinder mismatches 255 (NTFS) ! = 240 (HD)
HPFS - NTFS 344 10 11 2919 116 4 38940672
Warning: Number of Heads/Cylinder mismatches 255 (NTFS) ! = 240 (HD)
HPFS - NTFS 5 100 21 2580 206 14 38940672
Warning: Number of Heads/Cylinder mismatches 255 (NTFS) ! = 240 (HD)
HPFS - NTFS 2580 206 15 129201 40 24 1914499072

Now I just have to interpret what this is saying and figure out how to use it to save the files
in /my documents


Any and all help would be most appreciated!

 

You have two issues; the original drive is failing and there is a translation problem in the partition information.
I can't tell if the issue is with your PC or on the one the drive originally came from; but some BIOSes translate a drive to 255 heads and some translate to 240.
You can proceed with GetDatBack as that should handle the problem (I hope); but, I would have cloned the drive as soon as I saw the read error.

 

FWIW, purchased GetDataBack ... it was able to retrieve all data. Excellent software! Thank you for the recommendation!

 

I'm glad you got your stuff back!