Plz plz plz help me out of this situation! HDD Crashed!

[hitin]

Dears,

I am new to this forum and seeking help with data recovery of my laptop hard disk.

I drop it while laptop was running and since then its corrupted. I was able to detect it from Linux, when I booted using LinuxMint via usb.

However, a colleague recommended to run windows recovery on the startup which made it worse.
I am now stuck in a situation where I have to recover some of the important data from the HDD, which was never backed up in last 6 months. (I have learned the lesson, and will take backup everyday)

Its an WD Blue HDD for Lenovo E530C.

I tried applications like GetDataBack, File Scavenger, EaseUS and TeskDisk. None of them could help, at this point HDD is still getting detected with all its partitions in Windows 7 machine.

HDD size is 1TB with 3 partitions.

Any help or advice will be appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!

[hhddrec]

If you Drop it an dyour data is importat i think the best way is to contact with a pro becasue, the most probably is heads failure (recoverable) or media failure (no recoverable) or both failures.

is you do not have clean room, nothing to do by yourself.
You can contact with safwan1967.
he is on Qatar.


IMPORTANT NOTE: Please if your data is important do not connect anymore your drive, each time you power it you lose data recovery options.

[hitin]

Thank you for the quick reply!
I will check with the person. I just want to tell you that it was just a 1.5 feet drop while disk was inside the laptop. When I connected the drive to linux it was detected and I could see the files too.

It was only after I tried the windows recovery, it made it worse. Chksum or chkdsk got stuck at 70% and since then its started behaving like this.

[labtech]

Chksum or chkdsk got stuck at 70% and since then its started behaving like this.

Sad... never allows these to run when physical damage is suspicious. Cardinal sin in data recovery process.

[lcoughey]

If you crashed your car and wrapped it around a tree, would you just check the oil, start it up and try to drive home?

It is a physical issue that is quickly going from a relatively low price with a trustworthy data recovery professional to a potentially unrecoverable data recovery project by any data recovery professional.

[hitin]

@labtech Learned my lesson the hard way. Will always keep this in mind and advise others too.

@lcoughey I understand what you are saying. However the issue is that most of the data recovery tech's portray themselves as the expert. All they do is run these professional software to recover data, which anyone with the knowledge of using computer can do on their own.

I am planning to make a clean air enclosure and try to open the drive on my own, to observe and check the issue. As we don't have any professional HDD repair center here at my location.

Would you guys recommend this?

Warm regards!

[lcoughey]

My thoughts are, the cost for you to build an environment, get the proper tools and train yourself to recover this one drive will cost far more than it would to simply ship the drive to the nearest data recovery lab...with much higher odds of success.

If the expert data recovery techs don't have the technical skills and tools to safely recover your data, they are just wolves in sheep's clothing. It is a good move to steer away from them, for sure.

[hitin]

I handed it over to a professional or so he thinks. He sent me an image(attached) saying drive is detectable in bios and os.However there are bad sectors, further saying it would be bettor to send drive to India or Dubai as we dont have any local centers for data recovery.

Mostly people would run software application to recover data, which i understand could spoil it further?

Attachments

Bad sectors

[labtech]

I handed it over to a professional or so he thinks.

For the real deal, the simplest question to rule out "those who provide very basic DR services" is: for hardware failed drives, do you image/clone using software or hardware based equipment? Hopefully they will answer truthfully, and as result, the answer should be hardware based imagers. If that is not the answer, then as you said, you should stay away from those that can do "what anybody with computer knowledge can do."

There is a major difference between computer knowledge and storage device/any drive/data recovery knowledge. Two complete different things.

[hitin]

Thank you for your individual inputs. It was helpful, atleast to make sure that i dont go the wrong way.

I took hard drive to a center, who do head replacement and all. Apparently the guy can't fix a WD but anything else.

Further, he said WD drives are like usb with some board and all. Since there are bad sectors, head replacement wont work. And that the drive has integrated board that make things complicated. I dont understand most of it or atleast i dont concur with what he said.

He also said, if it was Buffalo or Seagate or any other drive he would have fixed it right away. Strange!!!

What do think, is that a fact? Its an WD Blue internal hdd for lenovo Thinkpad.

[northwind]

This doesn't sound like you're dealing with a real DR professional to me.

[pcimage]

Get your drive back from him ASAP!

[lcoughey]

Sounds like he is telling you a lot of BS to make it look like he knows what he is doing, but clearly does not have the slightest clue.

[jono-ats]

Get your drive back from him ASAP!

Or sooner . . . This person has no idea.

[hitin]

I must appreciate all of you, online forum like this saves time and money as well as shows how people are willing to support and help each other!

So, I have got the drive back and just because I wanted to do this always, I installed PupyLinux on USB stick. Booted my laptop from the USB and plugged in the drive. I was amazed to see the drive still getting detected and for one of the partition was looking good, with all its content visible in the file explorer.

So out of 3 partitions, I can see 1st with contents, 2nd is not accessible at all (Input/output read error) and 3rd shows me a folder named "DMZ". I tried running ddrescue to do a sector by sector recovery, which is slow but seems like something is happening.

Some of you might be wondering, as you asked me not to connect the device to any machine, why I still did it?! I got call from lenovo that they have got the replacement hard disk and I need to return this one. I don't have time or money to send the drive to someone outside my location (Bahrain). So, I have decided to try this step. I have strong feeling that my drive can be repaired (at least at this point of time), but I have to give it back to get the new one. Although lenovo mentioned that they don't mind me have it opened and do some data recovery.

I will give it back after the weekend, till then I will try to recover as much data as possible. Do let me know if any other software tool that I can use to do a sector by sector copy.

Thank you all for your support!!

[lcoughey]

If you can clone it with ddrescue and you are willing to accept the consequences if the drive completely crashes before it completes, you should be okay. ddrescue is the best software tool for the job.

Good luck.

[safwan1967]

Hi Hitin,

do you solved your issues?i send PM to you with some information needs to me for working on it.but i dobn't get any reply from you sir.
Thanks

[safwan1967]

Hello hitin,