need to recover data. What program do I use?

Uhm! pretty much what I said up there. Tried Get data back but didnt get any.... I see now that my 200 gb drive has reverted back to a 136 gb. Is it possible to fix this without moving data to another drive

 

When you recover data from a HD you must always recover to another HD. Recovering to the same one overwrites the files you are trying to recover and will cause you to lose them forever.

I've personally used "active File recovery" from this site and it worked out for me. But your chances of success depend upon how much stuffs been written to the drive since what you want has been deleted.

 

I haven't actively deleted it. My drive just became unavailabe and now asks me if I want to format. Also I have about 100 GB to recover. Will "active File recovery" handle that much data and if not are there any industrial strength programs out there. I have been online for 4 years and this is the first time I have needed to do this so I am in pre school here... Thanx for that "active File recovery" tip though

 

Having not actually deleted it, isn't a good sign. It means the drive is failing, which means it going to be even hard to recover then normal.

Although it doesn't really change anything, you can still try these programs. You still have to recover to another HD though. There is no except to this rule, you never recover data to the HD which you are recovering from under any circumstance.

As for the amount of data, yeah Active file recovery can do that much, in fact any recover program should be able to do any amount, unless it's got some limit which it asks you to pay for to remove.

 

was this your boot drive then you put in a new one and the new install of whatever OS you are using sees the drive as 136? might want to make sure 48-LBA is enabled ... also most of those data recovery programs only help if your file system is messed up not if the HDD is physically broken

 

A quick history. Have WD 36GB 10K x2 as main drive (RAID_0). 200 GB MAXTOR was sole storage drive for the last month. I just finished ripping and saving a movie to it (hmm the movie was called "The Rats" I wonder if that had anything to do with it) Immediately after the transfer was done I tried to view it and got a drive not ready error. I closed that message and tried again and got "would you like to format drive now" . Therefore I installed two more drives to aleve my depression... Now I am ready to recover the 200 but don't know anything about it. I would like to just re-write the TOC if there were a program that did that. I downloaded one called "HDD scan and restoration" from MG's downloads that looks like it does just that but I guess we will see soon enough

 

If you get really stuck you can TRY to simply do a quick format. Which would cause the drive to at least appear formatted while leaving the data alone. Which makes some data recovery programs happier.

Of course, you've got to understand, data recovery is a tricky business, and you can only go so far with software solutions. With proper HW, you can take a drive apart and recover data by removing the platters. Of course usually going into such methods would require paying a data recovery service.

 

Which version of Windows are you running? XP? If so, have you tried running the "Check disk for errors" utility (right click on the drive in My Computer, choose "Properties", then click on the "Tools" tab and then click on the "Error Checking/Check Now" button).

But it sounds like Windows can't access the drive at all if I read your post correctly. In that case you might like to take a look at a utility called SpinRite by Gibson Research at:

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

It's not designed to recover files that have been deleted, accidentally or otherwise, but for hard drives that have gotten scrambled somehow or are failing due to problems with the magnetic media aging or otherwise becoming unreliable, corrupt master boot records or partition tables -- that is, for serious disk problems short of outright mechanical failures -- it's quite an amazing tool. But not cheap -- $89. And while it's not too difficult to use and has some really amazing features the documentation for the newest version (SpinRite 6) hasn't yet been posted on the website for download as they're still working on it. So, for now, you have to download and use the documentation for SpinRite 5. You can download the docs and read them though before you purchase SpinRite and that should give you a pretty good idea about whether you'll be able to use the software and whether or not it may help you recover your data.

I purchased SpinRite several months ago after reading about it over the past several years and I really like it. I had some questions about some of the diagnostic data generated about one of my hard drives by some of the new features in version 6 that weren't covered in the old version 5 docs I downloaded and they replied to my email with the necessary info within 24 hours so I'm quite pleased with the tech support and looking forward to the release of the documentation for version 6.

You say you have about 100 GB's to recover? Does that mean that a large portion of the drive hasn't had any data saved to it? The important thing, as far as SpinRite goes, is that there is some free space available on the drive you need to recover data from as SpinRite does, in fact, use free areas on the drive (which it finds without user intervention) to temporarily write recovered data to while it tests the sectors it's able to recover data from to see if they can still be used reliably or should be locked out from future use. As Coco said in his post, typically file recovery software must use another drive or other media to write to, but SpinRite doesn't work that way. But it's very careful about choosing/using part of the drive for it's recovery work.

You can also run the program in a diagnostic mode that won't make any modifications to the drive but may help in understanding exactly what's causing your problem. The software download itself is rather small and doesn't take long even with a 56K connection. Once you've downloaded it you copy it to a bootable floppy (instructions for making the bootable floppy are in the SpinRite 5 docs) and then reboot to the floppy to run SpinRite from a command line.

I suspect if you wrote Gibson research an email and described your problem to them they'd be able to make a pretty good estimate of how likely it is that SpinRite could recover your data. They couldn't guarantee that of course, but I bet they'd give you an honest assessment of how likely it is SpinRite would be useful in your predicament. If you think SpinRite might be useful to you I'd suggest you NOT do any reformatting or other modification of the drive before attempting to recover data with SpinRite. For that matter, I think that's true of most recovery software -- the more you tinker with the drive, using different recovery techniques/software, the more unlikely it becomes that the next software you attempt recovery with will be successful. I think that's called "Catch 22"!

Good luck!

 

Ha Ha Ha I'll get my screwdriver. Gonna try this HDD restoration program. I'll let everyone know how it works...

 

Hey Eezak... thanx for that I have heard of spinrite. my friend sings about it all the time but I thought it was just for diagnosing... I will look into that. Not despret at this point so I can wait a few days.