need advice on odd situation

[Flanker37]

Hi guys, i had an unusual thing happen with my hitachi sata 1TB drive yesterday. I use it in a usb docking station. had it almost a year i think without any trouble. But yesterday whilst i was downloading a cue of files to the drive, the windows write delay error message popped up on the screen. sure enough my hd had vanished from the system. I restarted windows, and it reported my drive as 92Gb, so i took my drive and hooked it up internally to use the HDD capacity restore tool. Only this time it reported my drive as the correct size. But now it shows my drive completely blank.

I used the Testdisk application to search & restore the partition table, as i have used this before, but it hasn't worked. It still reports my drive blank.

Is the only option available to me now to use a data recovery program such as Active@ Undelete or something else.

I cant accept that i have lost nearly a whole 1TB of data, it all must still be on there.

Can any HD Guru help me out here please?

[jono-ats]

I gather you wrote the new partition to the disk with Test Disk?

Find a program that can read individual sectors and see if there is data visible on your drive. I suspect that you will if the drive is fully functional.

I think it's time to pony up and buy a decent recovery program, e.g R-Studio, Data Rescue, etc. If the partition is corrupted or you wrote bad info to the partition map, those programs can still help (assuming that the drive is not otherwise defective - i.e. only logical problems).

Make a clone of the bad drive FIRST and do your recovery on the CLONE, not the source drive.

DO NOT RUN A DATA RECOVERY PROGRAM ON A DEFECTIVE DRIVE.

[drc]

Make a clone of the bad drive FIRST and do your recovery on the CLONE, not the source drive.

This is the most important advice anyone will ever give. Well, maybe that and "no, don't open the lid yourself".

[hddmania]

If you are going to do the DIY thing, check your drive to see if you can access to the data area of the drive. If you can, then the logical recovery software should help you... If you can't access the data area, you might have to do the physical recovery option.

If your drive is on the dying breath, it might be cheaper for you to send it to a recovery firm than send it in after it really died.

[Flanker37]

Thanks for the quick replies, i'll buy a new 1tb samsung on thursday and clone my drive to it, and see how it goes from there. i have R-studio, ARAX, Active@ & a few others, from older HD failures.

This is just the first of this kind of failure that ive had

[hddmania]

Sounds like you got all the right tools for the logical recovery!! Hope one of them will do the job! Good Luck!!!

If it doesn't, seek a data recovery guy for help!!!

[pcimage]

One more piece of advice...

Do NOT use a Windows based program to clone the drive, use something low-level. Such as CopyR, Media Tools pro or dd_rescue.

Or send to me to be cloned professionally with Deepspar Disk Imager

Sean

[Flanker37]

ok chaps i am running R-Studio right now. If all goes well, and the files are restored to a different HD.

What kind of software tools can i use on the Hitachi that failed, in order to check if the drive is still usable?

I suspect that its only a glitch somewhere, and the drive is still usable. But i want to be 100% sure.

I have the Ultimate Boot Disk, which has some good tools on it.

But if you recommend any commercial software to use - please let me know

thanks again

[derp]

Flanker,

Have you read the good advice posted above? Read it again.

Right here you can find the DIAGNOSTIC program MHDD.

You need to diagnose the problem. Accurate diagnosis will provide possible solution.

NO, don't suspect a glitch or assume or GUESS anything - DIAGNOSTICS, DIAGNOSTICS !!!!

[pcimage]

You're running R-Studio on the original drive, or a clone of it?

[Flanker37]

OK Chaps, here's an update. After an 8 hour scan by R-Studio i went to the file select menu & the program crashed. So much for that idea...

I then fired up EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro v4.0.1 and after about another 6 hours, EDRWP found all my missing files using the Partition Recovery method. None of the files are damaged. (damaged files have a "d" on them) So the file recovery process is on the go with an estimated completion time of 188hrs.

Time to grow a beard me thinks

[pcimage]

I repeat....

Are you running on the original drive (thus damaging it further) or on a clone like you were advised?

[Flanker37]

yes i'm running off a clone, i bought 2 samsung HD103UJ 1TB drives on thursday, 1 for the cloned image, and the other to do the recovery. I was going to let my laptop run MHDD on the hitachi later today

[pcimage]

Glad you took the advice, it's surprising how many people ask for advice and ignore it because it's not what they wanted to hear!

Good luck with your recovery.

[hddmania]

Good Job!!!!!

[BlackST]

DFT doesn't do that. Can try to isolate defects but doesn't recover a 'format degraded' drive, Hitachi are terrible drives to refurb.

[drc]

Are you suggesting that DFT does something more than just a zerofill?

[Flanker37]

OK here's an update with Easeus DRW

76 hours into recovery, and i have recovered 381Gb out of 847.06Gb.

Still a long way to go yet.

If it wasn't for a sh!t load of 4Gb ISO's i had stored on this drive for back up. It wouldn't be taking as long.

It is taking roughly an hour just to transfer 1 iso




my beard is getting thicker

[Flanker37]

well chaps, full recovery took 182 hours. And i got it all back. And like i suspected, it must have been a glitch on the Hitachi.
I Ran MHDD, Spinrite & hitachi's own diagnostic programs & they all said drive was fine. Its been cleaned, Re-partitioned & formated.

thanks again for all your advice

[pcimage]

Nice one!