SATA Drive Recovery

[JHrusky]

Hi. I have a 1TB SATA drive that crashed and we are trying to get our data from. I can slave the device to another machine and "see it" using Spinrite, but when I try to recover it with Spinrite I receive a DIVISION OVERFLOW ERROR on the 4th sector and cannot get past that point. Spinrite sees 3 partitions on the drive and 2 of them are fine (I suspect these are the restore points and another factory partition), but the main, large partition cannot be restored due to that error.

If I just try to mount it in Windows, the computer cannot do so -- the error is "The disk in drive X is not formatted".

Is it possible the problem is a missing boot sector and, if so, is there any software available to restore same? Else, is there software available to format the hard drive without losing the data on it (not sure if that is possible or not)

The driver is a Seagate Barracuda 1000GB

Thank you in advance.

[lcoughey]

You are a little confused, I think. The drive is showing signs of physical damage and you are trying to recover the data with software, without dealing with the physical issues. If you value your data, send your drive to a trustworthy data recovery lab.

If you want to go it on your own, your first step should be to troubleshoot why the drive has read errors:

1. Weak or dead head?
2. Media damage?
3. Firmware damage?
4. Electronics damage?

Once you pinpoint the physical issues, you will need to fix them so that the drive full reads again. As it is unlikely to be a permanent fix and the drive will likely fail again, you should then get a full sector-by-sector clone of the drive to a known healthy drive. Then you can start using data recovery software to attempt to recover the files off the healthy drive, now that it contains a clone of your damaged drive.

[MindMergepk]

Is it possible the problem is a missing boot sector and, if so, is there any software available to restore same? Else, is there software available to format the hard drive without losing the data on it (not sure if that is possible or not)

you are dangerously close to make it worse. Spinrite is bad choice for failing drive.
if data is important send it to DR company.

[labtech]

Spinrite is NOT a data recovery tool. At best, it could be considered a drive refurbishing tool, but with the risk of damaging the files on the drive. If want data back, do not use Spinrite.

Sort of like saying: my car's engine is misfiring from a work spark plug, but if I keep clearing the fault codes in the car's computer, then it should fix the problem. It won't.

[fzabkar]

Can you show us a SMART report?

http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

Clone the drive, sector by sector, using a tool such as ddrescue (freeware). Ddrescue understands how to work with bad sectors. Spinrite does not.

Formatting is data destructive. It will only make your problems much worse. Do not be tempted to run CHKDSK against your drive.