I have a friend who dropped her laptop, and the hard drive no longer boots and is throwing tons of errors but not 100% errors. Naturally, she has a lot of pictures on it she has nowhere else. The drive isn't recognized in windows as a secondary drive, either.

I looked at it with my spinrite and it found a ton of errors near the beginning of the drive (part of a dell diag partition, I think). I didn't let it go to the end, though - I needed the machine for other work and it was projecting 400+ hours.

I think I want to clone it (errors and all) first, then have a second go at it with spinrite or something else. If the FAT is completely hosed on the primary partition but the files still exist, is there any reasonable way of finding the pictures?

I have an HP workstation I can hook it to, and a spare drive of appropriate size for cloning. I'm thinking some sort of bootable CD with the utility would be appropriate. A friend pointed me towards clonezilla. Are there any other reliable, reasonably user friendly (or very well documented) free tools I should look at? Or any other guidance?

Many thanks!

-jk

The best software I've found for this purpose is still GetDataBack. It's not free but i may be able to talk to you in PM

I would do more, but I'm on my phone right now...

Thanks. I'll take a look at it.

-jk

The free data recovery tool recuva saved my bacon one time, but I don't know that it is meant to work with physically damaged hard drives. I think it is more for recovering deleted data from healthy drives. But, you might give it a try.

tanstaafl.

Does the drive make any noises to indicate damage, such as the motor struggling, or clicks when the heads try to seek? If not, the damage may just have been the heads impacting the platters and only ruining the spots right under the heads. In that case, recovery may be possible with tools.

Recuva is great for accidentally deleted files, but unfortunately I haven't seen it do much of anything else.

No odd noises - no clicks or clatters. I think I'm OK there.

thanks,

-jk

In terms of software, in my list would be ZAR, GetDataBack, SpinRite, R-Studio, and Trinity Rescue Kit. Good luck.

Thanks. Spinrite has been one of my favorites for years, but beyond that, I'm at a loss.

-jk

By the sound of it your friends drive has probably been knocked out of calibration by the physical impact. If it doesn't have major damage to the platter surfaces, a recovery utility may well be able to restore the data, eventually.

GetDataBack works amazingly well, but on a drive with lots of errors is SLOW. I ran it on a drive from a friend a few months ago, a very old Maxtor 40GB IDE one, which was full of bad sectors, and it took it three and a half days to simply map the bad bits. Then another 4 days to retrieve everything it could.

It probably cost more in electricity to do the work than the drive was worth But seeing as it was the only copy of a charities entire financial records and other documentation, it was worth the effort. It got pretty much everything back.

Why is it that the people with the most important data never seem to have even heard of the idea of backups...

pca

I used R-Studio to recover data successfully a few years back, but it also was very slow.

Another vote for R-Studio here.

I think they will all be pretty slow but in this sort of situation what other choice do you even have?

Slow certainly beats nothing...

thanks everyone!

-jk

I'm wondering where the open source file recovery software is. It seems like these all follow the model of "we'll show you what files we can recover for free, but we'll charge you to actually get them." R-Studio at least lets you recover files up to 64KB, which should get back most people's Word documents but none of their photos.

Let us know how the recovery goes, though. I'm pulling for GetDataBack here. It's helped me out several times already and seems to really come through...

They exist. Here is a decent article.