Hi all

I came across this forum and thought I'd give it a shot as a last ditch effort to recover my data. First, a little background info.

Late last year, the machine which housed my very very old Seagate 80GB Barracuda died. PSU went, and so did the main board. Never really found out how widespread the damage was beyond that, since all I needed to know was that the machine was dead. I took the HDDs out and stored them, then it became a part of my 'to do' list to back the data up off of them.

On the weekend I decided to grab the data off the Barracuda. Plugged it into a test PC at work. On an ATA33 cable, BIOS picks it up fine, but when it got into Windows, I saw the drive letter but once I clicked on it the machine stopped responding. I figured it must have been something to do with the many drives that were also connected to that machine at the time, so stripped it back to basics and changed the IDE channel to use an ATA100 cable. Tried booting again, and this time it didn't even want to load Windows with the 80GB Barracuda attached. BIOS still picks it up, but Windows obviously has problems initialising it. Windows XP screen shows up, then disappears, but instead of loading into Windows, the screen just stays blank eternally.

When the machine is in this state, I can hear the HDD trying to read something. No clunking noise, just a reasonably repetitive sound of what I'd normally expect a healthy read to sound like.

There's a couple of unknowns. First, I don't actually know what caused the original PC to die. Second, I don't know what has happened to the drive between removing it from the case and trying to read it on the weekend. I can't rule out heavy handedness.

What do you guys think I'm dealing with here? Is it something that I might stand a chance of repairing?

I know I'm a hypocrit working in IT and storing my own data on an 8 year-old HDD without a full backup...

Thanks
Richard

Is the drive at least recognised by BIOS with correct name AND capacity ?
The "repetitive" sound when trying to read something may indicate either a problem while reading or some other damage.
After that...

Yes it is. BIOS sees the drive as the right make, model and capacity. I'm picking that it's causing Windows to hang when it is trying to scan the partition table, in other words, when it first tries to read something off the disk itself.

Need logical recovery then.

You think the drive might actually be capable of dumping data out even despite this big problem?

I guess I'll need to use something besides Windows for this.

Have you tried seeing what it looks like in windows under Disk Manager when you attach it to an external IDE - USB adapter? These are fairly cheap to purchase and a great tool for anyone to have. If this is a logical recovery you might get lucky w/ an external adapter and a recovery tool like GetDataBack or even something free like PhotoRec.

Don't think so. Seems one of these drives who make Windows HANG.

If you use a Windows 98 boot drive you will probably get past the initial hangup issue since Win98 doesn't interrogate the disk as rigorously as later versions. Once you're in, you could use a third-party recovery program such as R-Studio to recover whatever you can. It's not fool-proof but you have a good chance of pulling off a lot of data.

perhaps got lots of bad sectors.

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data recovery service[/b]

Had a decent play with it under Linux today. The data is all there, at least the file names were anyway. Mounted the NTFS volume and a directory listing of the root dir showed all the correct directory names. Once I try to traverse through the dirs, however, things go downhill pretty quickly. Getting loads of DriveReady SeekComplete errors. I'm running Spinrite over the volume at the moment (a friend of mine has lent me his copy for this) so I guess I'll see if it clears up the bad sectors.

Spinrite

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Is that smoke on the horizon?

Spinrite has been cancelled as bad sectors clearly aren't the problem, or if they are, they aren't the only problem. It took 1 hour to get to about 56 MB. Out of 80GB, it was going to take around 800 hours and was steadily increasing.

Trying another logical data recovery approach now, but really don't have any idea what the best plan of attack is. If I could do a byte by byte image capture of the drive, I could at least freeze what I have then could analyze that image for recoverable files. The trouble is finding a program with the patience to do that without aborting due to timeout errors.

WARNING! If you continue the diy approach you might lose your data forever or at the very least make the recovery job harder and more expensive.

You could make a sector level clone copy of your hard disk to a replacement using the free copy utility copyr.dma and then run simple software tools on the copy to get your data. Copyr.dma will skip the unreadable sectors but the problem here is it dosn't give you a log of skipped sectors so there is some risk in not getting back all the data intact.

Remember a real pro would use a combined hardware & software recovery system to get your data with a probable very high success rate.

Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to myself on this forum. Unlike many others, I don't just post for the pleasure of reading my own verbiage. If you're not going to take good advice, stop asking the same question over and over.

PS. Using Spinrite is a joke

A bit too late I think.

No, not at all, I took your advice on board. In fact, MHDD seems to be giving some very promising results. It hits delays on reading bad sectors fairly frequently, but it does manage to push beyond them. Painfully slow (I think probably about 8 days to move all 80GB) but the most promising solution thus far.

Cheers for the advice.

Too late if maybe I'd run it beyond 0.1% of the drive, which I didn't.

As an update, I got the entire drive worth of data back today after running MHDD overnight from the IDE drive then transferring the data onto a SATA drive. Plenty of bad sectors at the beginning, and perhaps a little more than that also, but once it got past about 20GB things seemed to flow pretty quickly. I came into work this morning expecting to see it at 10GB and it was up to 60GB.

Joined all the 1GB files together and mounted the resulting image file in Windows using imDisk and voila! All my data back. I'm sure I'll find the odd file that is corrupted, but on the whole, I'm most impressed.

MHDD was the perfect tool for this job. Thanks to all those who offered helpful advice on here. Time to go and dream up a decent storage strategy now.