My hard drive just died a few days ago. I don't care about anything except the photos of my son.

Every morning, I had Windows XP setup to do a backup of all of My Documents to a 2nd Hard Drive at 5am. A few days ago, I went to check my email before heading off to work and the machine was super sluggish. I noticed that Office XP was asking me to reboot as if I had just finished installing it and AVG Anti-Virus was asking for a reboot too (but every day at 6am, AVG does an update and sometimes needs Outlook to close first).

So, I did the reboot and suddenly, Windows is unable to start because some file ns_1252.dll or someting isn't found. I did all of the nornal stuff booting off of the WinXP disk into Repair mode to try to manually copy the file over. Nothing worked.

I ordered two new drives (to run RAID 1 now) and the just arrived today. Finally able to install XP on some new disks and plug the old drives in as normal drives, I've been installing Windows for the last few hours. To my abolute f'ing horor, even my backup is hosed because it is only 2kb and not the multi GB it should be.

I can browse the old C drive, but only some folders. What I want is the My Documents > My Pictures folder. It has 4000+ images including ALL of the images of my 15month old son!! I'm freaking out. I thought I had done enough to have a DAILY backup for my entire My Documents folder but I'M F'D.

I know there is probably nothing that can be done, but I'm posting here just in case the smart folkks at empegbbs.com can help.

Brad

PS - Dont buy Maxtor. This drive was less than 2 years old. Every other drive in my system is over 4.

I've used R-Studio to restore files from many hard drives. PM also sent.

Worst case you could send the drive in to a data recovery company.

Could it have been a virus maybe ? I have never had a drive fail where I can read some of the files they have always just died all together.

Damn Maxtor!
I've also had trouble with them. Hope you can sort your system out and retrieve some of those photos.
I've heard of some dramatic drive 'treatments' in order to get them working again- freezing, slapping, etc. They might work for long enough to get some stuff off of.

My next machine will definately be at least RAID 1 (maybe raid 0-1 or 1-0). Drives have gotten bigger and cheaper over the years, but I hate to trust them.

There's nothing in that description that sounds like a mechanically-failed hard drive; it sounds more like a corrupted filesystem. The first step is to, on another PC, perhaps using one of those USB-to-IDE gadgets, make a complete image of the raw disk. (Don't ask me or the BBS how to do this. Find someone who already knows.) Then copy that image, and you can use recovery tools on the copies, not the disk (in case a particular recovery tool does more harm than good, which isn't out of the question). If the worst comes to the worst, there are tools which can scan a raw disk image for data that looks like the header of a JPEG file, and which can recover those files as long as they're not fragmented.

If making the complete image fails, you're in it for the long haul and need to (find someone to) make an image by copying only those sectors which are still readable, and then go spelunking on that for JPEG headers. Is the partition FAT32 or NTFS?

Peter

I would suggest that the tool you want is getdataback, which does what is says on the box, very well indeed. I have used it to recover disks that were so badly corrupted the OS claimed they weren't even formatted, and got back almost everything. It takes hours to work through the drive, but works remarkably well.

It's worth the money.

pca

Thank you everyone. I happened to find GetBackData last night and let it run while I barely slept. Error messages looked real bad, and this morning I was able to browse around a partial tree of my hard drive but of course my main interest was GONE (My Pictures). Yet, I did a search on dsc*.jpg and found tons of my files. I'll grab them now while I can and use the image option to get the rest if possible.

And thanks for the heads up that running RAID1 isn't going to prevent this in the future. What I have is certainly a currupted filesystem. Any idea how that happens or are there a million ways?

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm $79

I had a lot of problems on a fileserver full of drives running windows 2000 pre-servicepack 3 or 4 (4 I think, but I can't remember), where it would blow holes in the filesystem at random. When you rebooted, it would whinge about bad clusters, and helpfully remap them by deleting the file that contained them! That was when I discovered getdataback for NTFS.

After a while, it ate something critical to continued operation and died completely. It turned out to mainly be some sort of bug in write caching to the drive, where it didn't always flush the buffer, but deleted it instead. Not apparently a hardware fault since I went through several drives, some RAM, and a motherboard in that machine as I slowly upgraded it, but the fault remained. I ended up upgrading to linux and ext3 and had no further problems It's still working perfectly.

I've never had that problem on any other 2000 box, of which I have a number.

I did have one drive which failed, and it turned out I could only get the data back under very specific circumstances, which was when the drive was at exactly 32 degrees C. Any warmer or colder and it errored constantly. I had to place it on top of the psu, with the room window open. If I closed the window the drive failed within a couple of minutes! If I opened the window it would start working again.

I got everything off it in the end, but it was really weird.

pca

I'm very sorry to hear this. Much like you, the only thing on my computer I fear losing is my photos (well, and Quicken data, but that's not an emotional loss if that gets hosed). I would have suggested GetDataBack as well, which I believe Patrick also suggested when something similar happened to me.

As for backing up, I would suggest regular backups to DVDs which you store off-site. And people can say what they will about Dreamhost, but they recently upped my storage from 65GB to 400GB. It would take me years to fill up that space, so in the meantime it'll be a great place to back up my photos. Still, I'm going to be making regular DVD backups and even using a spare 80GB disk (with one of those IDE-to-USB things Tony was talking about) to back up my photos. I then take the disk to work. Every time I load more photos on my computer, I make temporary backups (to CD) or I go through the process I just described. I'm quite paranoid about it these days.

I just can't trust a RAID to protect me from data loss. I even bought a RAID card this week, but I'm just going to run it in JBOD mode. I find multiple physical storage locations to be the only thing that eases my mind. Now, if my house, my office, and Dreamhost's headquarters all burn down at once, that would just suck.

I use rsync to backup a windows server to a windows client and a linux client. It's not super efficient on a windows client but it works good enough. A linux client and windows server is much faster.

I also had NTFS corruption for no apparent reason on 3 separate occasions while using the hard links feature of NTFS running under Windows XP. Running the same concept under Server 2k3 has been fine. Specifically I was getting MFT corruption. It was getting very large (think 10-15GB)

I wasn't very successful using R-Studio to get anything back but wasn't too fussed since it was only a backup. And RAID1 didn't save anything of course either...

Brad, I just happened to be watching DL.TV just now, and one of their topics was hard drive recovery. They had a segment they shot with a guy who spoke about data recovery at DEFCON. Apparently he does this much cheaper than most companies will, but he also freely shares his tips. I thought it was interesting that he claims that it's possible to recover data from 85% of failed drives.

DL.TV (episode 105)
myharddrivedied.com

Ha! I just now went to <a href="runtime.org" target="_blank">the site</a> of the software that they said he uses. Looks like it's GetDataBack! Interesting. Still, he seems to have reasonable prices. I think it's about $200 for drivest that just need software recovery.

*edit*
How is it going, by the way?

I have had great luck recovering images from corrupted CF cards with Zero Assumption Recovery. Download the demo and run it in "digital image recovery mode." It's completely free ($0) in this mode, and will only recover photos, but that's what you want anyway.

Yes, it ignores the filesystem and just grabs anything that is a photo (even things you may have deleted).

Heh. On our recent trip to England around the Cambridge Meet, I lost an entire day's worth of photos (about 400 or so) by accidently doing "rm *" in the wrong directory. The CF card had already had "delete all" and "format CF card" run on it, so I didn't have much hope of recovering them.

An hour later, I'd written a nifty little program to scan the card looking for the header "signatures" of Canon Raw (.cr2) files, and dumping out the following data (up to the next header) to individual files. Recovered everything.

Cheers

Sorry to hear that. I've recovered files with R-Studio and GetDataBack (though GDB lets me down sometimes). But what saved my tail on one dead drive was SpinRite 6. I've heard many sad tales which have ended happily thanks to letting SpinRite run on your drive for DAYS on end.

SpinRite is a boot disk with FreeDOS and an app which accesses the drive at a very low level. It makes the drive recover data from sectors that it would usually ignore as "bad". It can test read/write ability, refresh every sector, and all sorts of things. Most interestingly, if it hits a bad spot, it may invoke statistical analysis to estimate what each bit may be. It apparently re-reads a sector up to hundreds of times, positioning the read head slightly different each time to get a different view on things. With enough data, it can estimate. And if it guesses wrong, maybe you end up with a few flipped pixels in your image.

The mind numbing part is, SpinRite needs to run for DAYS, maybe even a week on large drives. If your drive is not clicking to death, let it run. From personal experience and what I've heard from others, it will really help.

An important tip: Run SpinRite on the disk in the machine it was always in, from the same IDE header it was on, set as Master if it was. Everything the same as it's been running for years. I transplanted my dying drive to another machine and it SpinRite locked every few hours. Back in the machine it was for years, SpinRite ran for maybe 3.5 days before I finally stopped it.

Possible causes of your corruption: I've recently had two drive semi-failures like you. Both were power related. One machine was plugged directly into the wall during a power outage. It booted but didn't load some startup items, so I rebooted and it was hosed. Running chkdsk probably made it worse. The other drive was one of three in a case probably underpowered by a cheap power supply. It clicked off during use (not the first time) but didn't click back on (like it had in the past). I was able to view it as slave, but only with great patience as it occasionally got stuck while reading for minutes. Got almost all 10 gig off it in one long day.

Good luck. SpinRite!

I lost about 30% of my data at this point. I'm saving this thread to try more meathods when I get my spirits up. You have NO idea how much time was put into editing, corrrecting, cropping, etc all of those thousands of photos. I just havn't wanted to deal with computers in the meantime. I have two empegs - one with a new "No Hard Disk Found" message, one with the horrible BUZZZ noise returning, I have a Creative Zen that is dead and now the PC ate itself. So... I've just been avoiding technology as much as possible and been trying to do stuff like paint my house and spend time with my son instead of look at photos of him. All of my Battlefield 2 buddies probably think I'm in jail or something.

Eventually I'll take a few days and try some more. At one point I thought I lost everytihng, so saving 70% or so is nice.

Warning to all: BACK UP TO DVD - NOT TO HD!!!

Thank you EVERYONE for your kind words and suggestions. I am going to try every one of them in a few more weeks.

Recordable optical media can fail, too. There is no panacea for backups.

In my experience, DVD's are much more prone to fail near the fringes of the disc. I usually cap my backup DVD's at 4G or under. I also burn at 1-2x if I'm in the least concerned about being able to get it back later. I haven't made a coaster in a looong time, but I'm not gonna push it.

I have used File Scavenger with awesome results. I was even able to recover all files I had on a drive that had been repartioned.Basiclly if your computer can see the drive, I can more than likely recover many of the files. In your case I would suggest using the 'exhaustive' mode, which took about 6 hours to go throgh a 250 Gig drive, but is saved my butt. I cannot compare it to getdataback, as I have not used that one.
Anyone have any experience with File Scavenger?

I you're that sick of computers, you might just want a professional to take care of it. I think I posted the link in this thread already, but check out this site. I think they have pretty cheap recovery costs, so at the very least it might be worth getting an estimate.

If you are interested in using some other company services, I had an absolutely excellent experience with www.ontrack.com . In EU they have a partnership with Kroll, a German based company. We had to recover data from a broken disk and had few days to complete the task. They were incredibly accurate and efficient. Manybe they are a bit expensive, though.