[Miklo]

Because of my panic, I forgot to log in earlier...
Sorry about that...

[alias120]

Many computer shops have the ability to retrieve data from corrupted or dying hard drives. You could try to salvage the drive, but considering the circumstances the reliability of the drive is in question. If you cannot afford to take the drive into a shop, you could take a risk and format the drive. Then use recovery software to pull data from past partitions. Regardless of whether or not you can salvage the data, I would suggest scrapping the drive and looking into a suitable replacement. You don't want to trust your data to an unstable piece of hardware.

[Miklo]

i am not very sure that this is a hardware problem. Whatever the problem is though, the disk will be replaced but before that I need to find a guaranteed solution to data retrieval..

[nooblet]

That's a tough problem to be in. Recovery software are generally crappy at recovering everything in one piece. The other issue is the drive could be a software or hardware failure. I wish I could provide you with a better solution. Unfortunately this is one of those areas where I would have said you should have frequent backups, store important files in Dropbox, run auto backups with S3, run Time Machine (macs), or RAID setup. None of those are going to help you at this point and in my experience, recovery files tend to get bits and pieces.

This post has been edited by nooblet: 01 July 2010 - 02:24 AM

[Miklo]

And here is the part that I say:

What is done is done!
What happens next?

This disk drive is a storage drive that belongs to my father so I am not responsible for not keeping backups. The raid setup is not in my knowledge but in anyway this is not helpful at the moment...

Pfff what can I do?

[nooblet]

I know it wasn't. Was just saying. I'm not sure you have a lot of options. You can try recovery softwares but as I've said, in my experience, they suck horribly. Although I can't really speak for all of them as I only tried a couple. But neither did the trick well. That said, if you absolutely can't access it, you can try to take it to a specialist or do it your way. Hopefully someone here has a better option.

[alias120]

As nooblet said, recovery programs are not very reliable. I tested out a few of them awhile back, and I recovered maybe 45% of the data. About 20% of that data was corrupted or inaccessable. This should be a last resort.

[Miklo]

I have tried recovery softwares myself in the past with great success in small sized files and enough in big sized files...

In addition to my experience, a friend of mine recently destroyed the TOC of his external disk and getDataBack managed to give him back 100% of his files.... intact!!!

This is the reason why I am keen on formatting my HDD and then trying this recovery master piece!!

[alias120]

I would say that besides taking it to a specialist, recovery software may be your only option. If you feel confident enough to take the risk, I would say go for it. The situation kind of sucks all around, because there are really nothing but risks at this point. Without being there and actually seeing the drive, it's tough to make any further recommendations.

[Miklo]

True. I can definitely feel what you say...
not being able to see and touch the drive in person is hard to tell. This picture I posted earlier is the only piece of evidence I can provide at the moment...

In thegreekz.com forum I posted the same problem. everybody strongly recommends not to format the drive as step one. just try to use recovery programs....

maybe this is the only way since specialists expect more than 1.000 euro as payment..

[calvinthedestroyer]

Can you tell is its a hard ware problem of a format problem?

I'm guessing that this is a format problem since your Linux OS can see the drive.

Have you tried mounting the drive?
You might be able to use the DD command to copy all of the data off of the hard drive.

I think that you have to have NTFS support installed in Linux before you can read an NTFS partition.

[Miklo]

I am not a good linux user, so i do not know many things on commands etc.
I just used a live version of Ubuntu linux 10.04.
the screen posted in message #1 is what I saw. I believe its not a H/W issue but possibly data wrongly written on disk caused by loss of power or sth similar.

[no2pencil]

If there was a sudden loss of power, then you must issue dash o force with the mount command to mark the NTFS partition as clean. I'm not sure how you would do this in a graphical mode.

If you don't know how to fix this, blindly using programs from the internet is a horrible idea. If your data means anything to you, take your drive to a computer shop that offers data recovery service.