Hi guys, I am a first time user in need of some advice. My laptop booted to a black screen this morning after it was working fine yesterday. I put in the windows cd and attempted to use the repair council. I did a chkdsk /r and after 6 hrs it was only at 54% and had been at that point for 2hrs of that time. At that point i shut down the machine. I took out the HD and used an IDE to usb tool and connected it as a slave HD to my other laptop. At first it didnt recognize it, but then it ran through the autoplay (it goes through all the documents when you first plug it in, like an external HD). I went to my computer and tried to access it, no luck. It said that it was unable to be reached. I let it sit for about 5 mins, I clicked it again and it opened but showed no folders or documents with in the drive. So I safely removed it, rebooted my pc and inserted my knoppix disc. It booted up, and I did the same thing. I connected the drive with my IDE to usb tool to my laptop. The same thing came back, in ran through autoplay. I clicked on the drive and it said that it was unavailable and said that my NTFS was dirty. At this point I dont know where else to go, the drive makes no clicking noise and sounds completely normal. Any advice from anyone would be a great help! Is there some software I could use, or at this point should I give in and send it to a recovery service?

Thanks in advance- David

Sounds like you got some bad sectors.

You need to get it imaged with some specialist non-windows based kit or s/w, then use recovery s/w on the image.

Where are you based?

If in/near UK, I can do this with DeepSpar disk imager to minimise the risk of the drive dying during the process, at a special price for you

Sean@pcimage.co.uk

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Well, if it's important to you, it might be worth sending it somewhere. Anything you do carries the risk of ruining the data forever.

If you insist on doing this yourself, here is what I'd do:

Get access to a real desktop if possible.
Get a second drive, as big or bigger than your bad drive
Using imaging software, try to make an image of the entire drive
Using Data Recovery software, try to recover your files from the image.

If the data is important to you, don't mess with the original drive any more than you have to. Don't run CHKDSK. Don't run any DR software directly on the drive. Don't even leave the drive on longer than you need. Make a copy of the drive, and play with the copy. The drive isn't going to get any better with you fiddling with it, only worse..

If none of this works, then the road is much harder, and likely the end for homebrew solutions.

That CHKDSK process may take quite a bit of time, and 6-8 hours is not at all uncommon, especially on the larger disks. When I was less experienced, it was an easy way to get Windows to boot again. Now that I know better, I'd never let it complete due to the mess it creates when it's confusing physical with logical failure and attempting to "fix" it. Imaging, and fixing the disk image would actually be faster.

You are still within the logical recovery realm, but your data is available for a limited time. Don't delay in deciding what to do, as it may become a physical failure at an exponentially greater cost.

You can still do it yourself. dd if=/dev/sdb of=image.dsk bs=50000 could do the trick, for example, if the disk was accessible in linux as /dev/sdb

My lab is in the US. Logical recovery is inexpensive. If you wish to learn more, please review my profile here

Hi,

For the drive with bad sectors inside, the linux dd is too agressive!
It can break down the drive.
The linux kernel uses 5 times retry itself on each bad block!
And with the default 64K readahead, it is more .........

Don't do dd on it if your data is important, i suggest....

Regards,
Janos

Already Made mistake due to run of CHKDSK. Its the time to send to professional, dont do any more yourself where u r going to make it more complex. already u made it complex by running CHKDSK, here a lot of persons comes after selftry, most of the case- running CHKDSK... which mess up more the hdd data. "Dont run CHKDSK if bad sectors" A LOT OF TIMES THE TERM used but all wanna save money, instead of they lose more money and make the data unrecoverable forever...

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