Hello all,

My Sony Vaio laptop running Windows XP Media Center 2005 w/ SP3 crashed following a Windows Update gone bad. After the Windows splash screen, I am left with a black screen with control of the cursor. Booting to all three Safe modes results in the same thing. I need to recover some files from the hard drive and have tried several things to no avail. I have tried booting using Knoppix and Ubuntu, but neither could find the hard drive.

The laptop has dual 100GB SATA HDs (master and slave) to make a combined 200GB. I have removed the hard drives and tried connecting them to my desktop using an external USB dock. The desktop is running Windows Vista Home x64 with SP2.

When I connect the primary/master 100GB HD to the desktop, it is assigned a drive letter, but when I try to open it in My Computer, it tells me that is needs to formatted. Under Disk Management, it shows that the drive is Healthy (Primary partition) with 93.16 GB allocated. However, it shows the file system is RAW. When I connect the slave 100GB HD, its not visible under My Computer, but under Disk Management it shows that there is 93.16 GB unallocated and does not list a file system. Prior to the laptop crashing, I had about 180GB of information stored on the hard drive, so there is information on both that I would like to backup. Obviously, the file system was NTFS. I really need to recover some files from the hard drive, but I still have no way of accessing the drives.

I'm not entirely sure if this is hardware problem since I ran the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and both of the 100GB HDs were recognized and passed without any problems or errors. I welcome any help or suggestions in trying to access the hard drives and recover my data.

A lot of time when a windows update goes bad it can lock your HDD with password and this can cause you this problem. You might have to find a local DR company to unlock this drive and give you back access to it. There is really nothing else basically wrong with this but password locked drives will block you out of getting into your windows. Good luck

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Iorana Haraharaini

Probably just s/w corruption, install some DR s/w on your main PC and scan the suspect drive as a slave/USB connected device. If the HDD was p/w locked then DFT wouldn't be able to scan the surface (assuming you have run a full surface scan in DFT that is)

You can download demos of s/w (e.g. Getdataback, RStudio etc..) to make sure they can see your data before purchasing. Don't forget not to copy recovered data back to the suspect disk!!!

Of course if you are uncomfortable with this, then your best bet is pro help. You'll probably get a pro recovery for less than the s/w would cost you anyway, at least at this stage before it's been buggered about with.

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PC Image Data Recovery
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Thanks for the replies. The HDD was not password protected. Also, do you know if any particular data recovery software is best suited for recovery from a RAID environment? The two HDDs were in a Raid 0 array in the laptop, and I have found that a number of software programs don't work for this setup.

Ah, a damaged R0.

That's a completely different kettle of fish, strongly advise pro help on this one if you need your data at all.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

The thing is, I don't really know if the RAID is broken. Since this stems from a Windows problem and both drives are still working physically, the RAID itself may still be intact. I would try using Runtime's Getdataback and RAID Reconstructor to analyze this, but I don't have a Windows XP CD to create a BartPE boot disc since Sony never provided one.

UFS Explorer is fantastic for RAID 0 recovery.

When you will encounter ZSFS drives (i.e. SCxxx) you'll see...

I have headache thinking about the toasters...