Hey all,

I get to work this fine Monday morning and I am approached by our "Information Manager."
Her computer won't boot. XP Pro tells us to insert the original XP CD and run repair mode to fix a damaged file. I reboot in hopes that it was a fluke and get the same error with a different file.

I then run IBM's Drive Fitness Tool (it's an IBM machine) and it gives me a "Disposition Code" and now IBM is sending me a new hard drive.

Now to try and recover the files - hmmm....

In the good old days of FAT filesystems one could simply pull the drive from the original machine and add it as a second drive to a working maching and browse and copy the files over. This is the first time I have actually had a hard drive fail on me with a NTFS filesystem and I didn't think it would be that easy... and it appears that my thoughts were correct.

The working machine (from which I am now typing) detects the hard drive correctly and boot fine. The first time I booted, XP ran a scan because it detected problems with the drive. (Errors all over the drive.) I then shut down without doing anything (the IBM guy was on the phone insisting that I run DFT). I ran DFT and got the code for him fine and dandy. On the next boot XP loaded as usual but no extra drive was listed in 'My Computer'. I then go into computer management, Click on Disk Management and it asks me to initialize the drive. I cancelled that and saw that the drive was there. It has a Yeild type of icon in it. It says "Unknown" where the first dive says "basic", the full size of the drive and then "Not Initialized". The drive space shows up as being Unallocated.

I am at a loss right now as to where to go. Buying a piece of software will be a hard sell (but not necessairly impossible). I have a Knoppix distro from about a year ago at home that I can play with but as I am more or less Linux illiterate I have no idea where to go with it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do? I have spare hard drives and such around so I can clone this bad drive to another but I think I would still be in the same boat as I am now.

Thanks for any ideas!

Rene

P.S. As she is the "Information Manager" she had quite a bit of 'Information' on her computer... she's kind of upset.

You may have already found this one but here is a fairly comprehensive list of tools both free and for sale.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Q_20719830.html

Boot with Linux or DOS using NTFS reader software, and copy out as much of the data as you can?

Not sure but I think PC Inspector actually changed something with the drives setup. Didn't look good but it said rebuilt.

Still plugging away... sigh.

I have used a tool called GetDataBack for NTFS by Runtime Software successfully in the past on a drive with a completely screwed partition, and can recommend it highly.

On the other hand, if you drive has hard errors, or anything else has tried and failed to recover it, you may be out of luck.

pca

I have used File Scavenger by OnQue with great sucess. In fact, when I checked it was the cheapest and one of the faster ones. It ONLY does NTFS. You can download a 'trial' copy, that will at least let you see if it would be able to recover the files. Then you can see if it is worth it to pay the $39.00 for it. In my case, it was able to recover about 30 gig of mp3 files. I only lost 6 songs. It has several modes, including a 'defunt volume' scan. It worked well for me, but maybe someone else has a better idea?
Feel free to pm me if you like, and I can give you the website, and a few more details/suggestions.

I second Patrick's mention of GetDataBack. It's let me down lately, but I've given it some tough challenges. Best thing about it is, if you buy it (and it's worth it), you can call for tech support. You get a real live human (who's not a mindless drone) on the phone after a few rings and no annoying automated attendant. It's a pretty good deal.

I'm trying GetDataBack. Unfortunately I left work with it scanning last night and sometime during the night it crashed and my computer rebooted. I am trying it again now and keeping my fingers crossed.

Rene

Edit: Crashed again.

I've had good success with R-Studio NTFS. Here: http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

The important thing with data recovery is not write anything to the drive. i.e. always recover to another good drive. Any decent recovery program will enforce that.

GetDataBack is excellent if the integrity of the disk is good.
I had it restore data from a partition which we had deleted but not formatted.

Ditto. Something (me, I think) deleted my boot partition a while back, and thanks to pca (I believe), I got all my info back. Bery simple, too. Everything was there in folder structures, I just picked what I wanted, and it all backed up.