fiestaturbo.com

[Fezzy Turbo]

I have a Maxtor second hard drive (only 20gig) in my desktop but it has failed. I switched on my PC to find it had partitioned itself and would not let me access it. I have since deleted the partition but now the HD wants to be formatted, but one MAJOR problem .......

ALL of my restoration pics, holiday pics .... etc etc are on there. I used a free software (PC inspector) to try and recover some pics, but i have only managed to recover one set of holiday pics.

Does anyone know of a good software recovery program ? or am i wasting my time ?

Any help greatly appreciated.

[JamieFRST]

The one you tried is not bad, you could try a linux boot cd like http://www.knoppix.net/ it has lots of tools for various things. There are lots of guide for recovering files using it just google it. Could also try http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ that has some disk clone tools. And just come acorss this http://www.undelete-plus.com/

[dontpannic]

What filesystem was it?

There are some fantastic tools called "GetDataBack for NTFS" and "GetDataBack for FAT". They usually cost money but I have never failed to recover data from a disk with it, (obviously if the disk has a mechanical failure, you'll have to pay OnTrack to recover the data, but that costs £700!

[Fezzy Turbo]

Thanks for the help, Mr Andymac is sending me a disk with some hocus pocus software, i will try the sites

............obviously if the disk has a mechanical failure, you'll have to pay OnTrack to recover the data, but that costs £700!

That will be a NO then

[dontpannic]

I know. I was as suprised as you seem to be when the american woman on the phone told me that. I was staggered!

If you want Getdataback, give me a shout over PM. Can't hurt to try.

Nick

[andymac]

Interesting that, as they pulled a few hundred gigs of data off an lto last year for abtut £400, which I thought very reasonable.

[dontpannic]

this particular drive, the heads and motors failed. from what my tandberg course taught me, LTO media is fairly easy for the pro's to recover data from

[andymac]

this particular drive, the heads and motors failed. from what my tandberg course taught me, LTO media is fairly easy for the pro's to recover data from

Fair play, was a time vs data value exercise for me

[dontpannic]

Nice So far I haven't had to do a major recovery yet (touches wood with crossed fingers)

[andymac]

Recovery isn't the hard bit. Getting infrastructure and somewhere physically to put gear is the problem. That and comms links. Gah, all hard lessons learned and the worst bit; the facilities I've asked for to prevent the situation happening again have been thus far refused. Bloody idiots, when the revolution comes etc etc etc

[Fezzy Turbo]

Andy,

that software you sent me, it looks for partitions but there arent any on the HD thats got problems. I tried another bit of the software but it didnt find anything

anything else on that disk i can try ?

cheers
Greg

[andymac]

Offhand, no idea - I've only used those tools twice and both times they just worked out the box.

[Fezzy Turbo]

I will keep trying with it.

How the heck can i get all my resto pics back from Photobucket ???

[hobomassiv]

Little tip, once youve recovered everyhting, stick the HDD in a sealed bag in the freezer for a bit, take it out and let it warm up to rom temp on its own. Plug back in and reformat/scan for errors.

This has been known to work on dying hard drives quite often, but only do it when you know all the data is off.

[Fezzy Turbo]

Yeah but i cant get the data off

[Fezzy Turbo]

I got a piece of software from a friend that has recovered 99% of the data i had on the failed HD ...... happy is not the word!!

So i highly recommend ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) ver 8.3

[dontpannic]

Well done! I came across a bit of software called SpinRite, which does a similar thing. I've now seen it recover data from a drive which sits there clunking away.

[Fezzy Turbo]

Yeah im really happy to recover 99% of everything i had on the HD. I think i will hold on to this piece of software, just in case.

[JamieFRST]

The memory card got corrupt for dslr a few weeks back and I lost 100's of photos, but undelete-plus.com managed to get it all back

[Philie*RST]

so did an of these work? i have a picture file i recently deleted and need it restoring any advice?

[andymac]

From the memory card ? Any FAT/Fat32 undelete tool will work so long as you haven't used the card again. From a hard drive is another matter; the files may be recoverable but the more the drive is used the greater the chance that part of the space previously occupied by the file will be overwritten with something else.