Outpost Universe Forums

Off Topic => Computers & Programming General => Topic started by: Leviathan on January 16, 2007, 04:00:26 PM

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Leviathan on January 16, 2007, 04:00:26 PM

Any one have any experience in Data Recovery?

Ive got a backup folder on one hard drive and now i cant go into it, windows wont let me. Says drive is not formated would u like to format it or input/output error. Rest of hard drive is fine. Well apart from one folder where most of the folders have gone missing, everything after A. It was a 30gb folder now its 6gb. Anyway I cant get into my backup folder!

Dam windows, dam hard drives, or something! :P

Thanks

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: BlackBox on January 16, 2007, 04:23:48 PM

Try Spinrite. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) I hear it works pretty well if the drive is not physically damaged (assuming its just FS damage).

The other thing you could try, from a command prompt, is chkdsk /f x: where x: is the drive letter.

If the partition type is fat(32) you could also run fsck from linux to check the filesystem.

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Hooman on January 16, 2007, 08:47:32 PM

Wow, chkdsk, ever tried moving up to Scandisk there Hacker? :P
 

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Leviathan on January 17, 2007, 02:09:32 AM

One site said you should not run chkdsk on the drive as it may damage it and write over data but that doesn't make too much sence unless its doing changes to the drive.

Anyway I mite try SpinRite.

Currently im running a scan with a program called Recover My Files, 10 hours in and its done 6,173,263 of 240,121,729 sectors. Its going really slow at some parts and taking ages to get to the next sector so there may be damage to it.

I should of picked a newer drive for my backups.

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: BlackBox on January 17, 2007, 01:54:22 PM

Quote

Wow, chkdsk, ever tried moving up to Scandisk there Hacker? :P

Windows 2000/XP don't have scandisk. chkdsk is the only filesystem-repair utility in these OSes. (and it is better than the scandisk of older Windows OSes... it's basically a command line version of it that will actually attempt to correct damage and works with NTFS.

I would try programs like spinrite, etc before you use chkdsk; since those work at a disk level instead of a filesystem level trying to fix bad sectors.

Chkdsk on the other hand will modify filesystem structures when run with the /f switch if it detects damaged ones; some pieces of files will probably be lost. (this might be unavoidable).

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Mez on January 17, 2007, 02:53:07 PM

If your concerned about data loss, get another drive of equal or bigger size

Get a linux live CD

and dd the damaged HDD, work off the copy and do the chkdsk/ risky recovery techniques

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Leviathan on January 18, 2007, 10:21:10 AM

dd??

I think im gonna buy software called iRecover.

I stoped the scan I was doing and it found about 8000 lost files mainly txt data but all were lost files/data on the drive that it found and didnt have a file system location.

When I used iRecover it showed me where the files were. And everything I want is in one folder called Backup which is what I cant get into.

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: BlackBox on January 18, 2007, 02:38:15 PM

dd is a tool to copy raw sectors of drives on unix.

For example

Code: [Select]

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

would copy the entire contents of the first IDE/internal SATA hard drive to the second IDE/internal SATA hard drive (of course overwriting anything on the second hard drive). Since it copies raw sectors, partitions and everything will be copied.

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Leviathan on January 20, 2007, 07:20:06 PM

Got some software called Easy Recovery Professional and its done me good! Got my files back :)

Title: Data Recovery
Post by: Stormy on January 21, 2007, 11:56:17 AM

awesome :)

Glad to know you got your stuff back.. :)