HDD recovery

Just wondering if anyone can help me, and maybe suggest the best way to go about recovering my HDD.

The drive is a Maxtor 250GB IDE, installed in an external caddy. I was transferring files onto it, when my PC crashed and I had to manually reset. Now I get the following message

"G: is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

I've tried running chkdsk, but it doesn't even start. So I tried using partition magic to check for errors and again it's a non starter. Gives me a "bad file record signature" error message. The drive also shows up as ?H? (G : )

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

 

Take the drive out of its external case and connect it where your CD normally is. HDTune ( http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4130.html ) is a great little freeware app that will then let you see if the drive thinks it is failing (Health tab) and you should run the Error scan to see if it has bad sectors.
If it is OK, do Start -> Run -> CMD<enter> and try running CHKDSK, without the /F to see how bad it thinks things are. If they are minor (doesn't scroll thousands of errors past on the screen), go ahead and run it again with /F then copy your files off.
If the read scan reports errors, you really should clone the drive to a good one and then run CHKDSK on the copy.

 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'd already tried hooking the drive up as a slave, but my system just hangs before WinXP has finished loading. So with the drive still in it's caddy, I ran HD tune. Health status is n/a but the error scan says everything is ok with the drive. CHKDSK still refuses to run.

Where to go from here?

 

The drive is detected in BIOS correctly?
Go to Maxtor and get their boot disk to run diagnostics or get the UBCD (Ultimatre Boot CD, which has *all* manufacture tools)

 

The easiest and safest way to connect a drive temporarilly is to unplug the IDE cable from the CD/DVD drive and use it. This usually defeats problems with master/slave and/or conflicts with the boot drive.
All of the internal drives should always be set for CS, after which, the gray connector is teh slave and the black is master.

 

Thanks for the help guys. I'd be lost without you

Yes, the drive is detected in the BIOS.

I downloaded and ran SeaTools for DOS - it came from the maxtor site, so i'm assuming that's the correct diagnostic tool? The quick test gives an error and tells me to run the long test. Long test freezes at 0%

However, I've now got my faulty drive booting internally alongside my OS drive. OS drive jumper was set to CS and was on the master cable, so it should have worked? Anyway, a change to the master jumper got it working.

HDtune is telling me the health of the drive is OK. CHKDSK still doesn't work.

I'm not sure where to go from here? I'm reluctant to give up and lose what was on the drive.

 

If you had to put the jumper on Master rather than having both drives set to CS, there is either an odd failure going on or an incompatability between the two drives. Either can be deadly when we are trying to recover data. I will again suggest you try the drive all by its lonesome self on the other IDE channel.
I am tempted to suggest we clone your drive to a known good drive based upon the Seatest results; but, what does CHKDSK do when you try to run it?

 

My OS drive is Western Digital, so perhaps it's an incompatability between the two. In any case, both are now on seperate IDE channels, as suggested.

When running CHKDSK from the command line, the dos box flashes up momentarily, then closes again.

 

do Start -> Run -> CMD<enter>
In the CMD window which appears, type CHKDSK <drive-letter>:<enter>
Example: CHKDSK E:

 

The type of the file system is NTFS.
Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted.

 

I have to strongly disagree with this statement. And as we found out, the CS settings were causing a problem with booting. IMO internal IDE drives should always be set for master on the end of the cable, and slave for the 2nd (or middle) connection on the cable. Not all IDE cables have gray and black colored connectors, so using this as a standard reference doesn't really work. As we discovered, hooking up the problem drive on it's own IDE channel as a master seems to work. Now, at this point it seems to me that running data recovery software or maybe a partition 'rebuild' or recovery tool is the way to go. Here's some free apps:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/TestDisk_&_PhotoRec_d5561.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Ultimate_Data_Recovery_d5336.html
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Victoria_for_Windows_d5688.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/TestDisk_d4803.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Saving_d5753.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Find_&_Mount_d5740.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Disk_Investigator_d1341.html
And that's just the free ones. If you think the data is worth it, there's many quality paid programs available that should have no trouble recovering the data if one of the free tools doesn't do it. Check here http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html and here http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html I can also recommend Easy Recovery Pro from Ontrack software. I have used it many times to save data from formatted and crashed drives. It's really easy to use and usually does a great job, but it isn't cheap. I think it's about $90 these days. More info available here http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/file-recovery-software/ They have a free trial that you can download and run, if the data is there and can be recovered, the trial will show you this and you can then decide whether or not to purchase the software based on the results of the trial run. You cannot actually save the data with the trial but it is useful to see if your data can even be saved.
I hope this helps! Good luck!

[dlb]
:major

 

I had a similar thing twice in the past 6 years years, my solution was to get another HDD (Pretty cheap at the moment) installed it as the "C" drive and installed the operating system (In my case I upgraded to XP Pro from 98se) and installed the programs I needed.

I then installed the HDD that was is in trouble, jumpered it as a slave, and I could then access the troubled HDD, I then copied any DATA I required to the new HDD drive.

I've been a bit slack and both the troubled HDDs are still in my computer and still in use.

Perhaps I was just lucky but it worked for me, good luck hope this helps.

 

Thanks Bill E, but I've already tried to access the drive from other OS's - XP, Vista, Knoppix etc......all to no avail.

I'm now recovering my files with "Ontrack Easy Recover Professional" (Good call DLB) . Seems to be working although the recovery time estimation says it's going to take over 85hrs.

Anyway, lesson learned and thanks once again for all your help guys