Hi, my very first post here. Sorry if it is inappropriate to post success stories, but thanks to this forum, I was able to restore.

Problem: a friend of mine calls that his 'computer stopped working'. He said that the disk was acting up, and he did a diagnostic (I think his BIOS allows to run a diagnostic test, because the windows wasn't working anymore) and it reported that the hard disk needed to be replaced.
Obviously, he had no backups of anything. This is the only computer that they own (the laptop), and it stores all their family pictures... Great...
I asked him to mail me his hard disk (they live 500km away from me), but most of all, to stop trying to do anything himself because it would only make things worse. He knows just enough about computers to be dangerous

After receiving the hard disk, I hooked up the disk via an external USB box to my machine and I started using the tools I am familiar with (EaseUS partition recovery, easy recovery professional) but they couldn't find anything really. My computer was acting up with this drive connected (being sluggish, disk management in windows 7 would hang, ,...) so there was something not good.

So, I decide to boot in a standalone bootable version of gparted. It did see the partition, but couldn't do anything with it.

I was starting to think that I would not be able to recover anything. I had given up on fixing his hard disk (the thing is toast), so I only focused on trying to recover the data. I then started looking around on the internet, and somehow ended up on this forum.

Well, that was extremely educational. I have read and learned more about data recovery in the last 3 days than I have ever had in my life. I now realize that I was taking risks working directly on the problem drive with gparted, and that I should have made a copy of that drive. I know I should never restore on a problem drive itself, but I have learned a lot. Thank you, all of you!

The solution in the end turned out to be r-studio (never heard of this prior to visiting this board). I ran the free version of r-studio on the disk. Took about 12 hours (lots of bad sectors on the drive), but it was able to come up with a list of files that seemed restorable. I restored a couple of them (smaller than 64KB of course, because that is the limit of the demo version), but r-studio was able to build a list of files that it thinks is recoverable. I emailed that list to my friend (who could confirm that this list is indeed what was on his hard disk), and I asked him if his data was worth $80 (the purchase price of r-studio) to him. He said "yes", so I purchased a license key, and started running the recovery last night. This morning, I see that about 50GB out of the 167GB has been recovered, and I can look at the full resolution pictures, and it all looks really good.

The only thing I don't like about r-studio is the fact that you can't really see what files it is working on. Sure, it shows you the files that fail, but it would be interesting to see the files that it is currently restoring (in the log window). Regardless though, this is a fantastic piece of software, and I am very happy to own a license of it now (yes, I am keeping the license. I know my friend paid for it, but I consider that a reward for my hours of effort).

Again, thanks to this board I found all these great tools, and learned so much, so really, it is thanks to you that my buddy will have his wedding pictures and the pictures of his newborn back. You guys rock!

I will now also suggest to him to put CrashPlan on his computer (that is what I use for my data backup) so he will never have to worry about his data again.

A heartfelt thanks to this board. You made someone very happy!

Risky business running software on a failing drive. You got lucky, others won't be.

Cloning the failing drive to another (empty) drive of same or larger capacity should be your first step, if the drive has minor bad sector or read error problems, and running the recovery software on the cloned copy of the original drive to get your data.
HDD raw copy tool , freeware , in this forum/files section is one such tool to clone .
Good work though, you have your data back.

BTW, the last version of R-Studio simultaneously creates images and scans disks. You wouldn't have spent a spare minute.

_________________
R-Studio Data Recovery Software

Just a quick follow-up. The data recovery finished, but it took 2 restarts of r-studio to accomplish this. Not sure why, but r-studio hung up twice, usually during a recovery of a directory with a lot of files. One example was the winsxs directory. I had to exclude that directory from the recovery (which is fine, because I was only interested in the data anyways).

So, my question to r-studio (if there is someone from that company that frequents these boards) is why it would hang twice on me. This is the latest version (as I just bought it), so that was a bit unexpected.

Again, thanks though to this board. I believe that I have been able to restore all my friends' data and learn a ton of new techniques in regards to data recovery along the road. Good day!

I don't speak for them, but I would expect that bad sectors may have been the root cause.


If you still have the drive, run a SMART utility against it. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Agree on the bad sectors causing lockups.

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Guys.. I have to post here, too.

my Se-NoWayOut Hard Drives [ST31000528AS] were successfully fixed; all backup data restored Special thanks goes out to my boys at Wayne State for the restoration job and boy were they fast but go figure, all those servers they have their IT team manage were awesome. I even got to work inside the clean room, see how it works internally and play with the software!

Wu is awesome!!

At this point I'm pacified, however I don't want to abandon what I've started here with you guys so I'll devote approx. 40+days worth work implementing a solution for the rest of you that aren't as fortunate as me.

I'll most likely start my own forum If I cannot find a suitable location already.

Thanks Again guys!

~UART "Your strength is the flower, dedication is the Power! You can dwarf ANY tower working hour after hour!"