Please Help - Lost Partial Data of every file

[Zaki_Anwar_Hamdani]

Well, Here is my story:

1) I was using Acer laptop with Hitachi HDD (Z5K320-250 HTS543225A7A384 H2T250854S7).
2) One fine morning my laptop stopped working due to some xyz reason. Being in hurry, I just checked the HDD, it was working with my old old Toshiba Satellite L30 so I put in it and started using it.
3) When I had enough time, I bought another faster laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T61) and thought to put that HDD with this new laptop.
4) So I put this HDD as internal HDD to my newly bought laptop, and here began my problem...

5) Upon starting, the laptop stuck with just a cursor blinking.
6) I waited for sometime ad then restarted my laptop thinking may be I should detect new HDD manually in CMOS setup
7) The HDD was already showing so I restarted laptop and it stuck again.
Confused, I put the HDD in Toshiba, it went for scanning disk for errors and deleted some "Unused File Index"
9) Upon completion, I was like, hmm, its working here, so I put it in Thinkpad again
10) It didn't start again. Steps 5 to 8 repeated again
11) So I thought this HDD wont work with this laptop, so lets use it as external disk.
12) With supporting hardware, I connected this as external drive and tried to copy the data to laptop
13) All folders and data were present nicely but alas, when I opened a file, it was corrupted.
14) I checked with some of the data files, almost all files are corrupted, have lost partial data.
15) Like videos will run but with few seconds missing every ten seconds.
16) I saved almost all data as .zip files and they are all corrupted.

I am sure the data is still present on HDD but the scan has deleted those "Unused File Indices" and that is causing problem. I am not sure of there is some way this can be fixed. Please Help !!!

Feel free to ask me if you have any further questions.

Thanks in Advance.

[falther]

What I understood our of your text:

A laptop crashed (got stuck) most probably because of a defect hdd.

Everything you did afterwards is (sorry to say) playing around and making
it worse instead of getting professional (local) help.

The 1st step is allways to get data off of a defect drive, but with knowledge
and experience.

Contact a local data recovery professional - perhaps one here of this forum
can assist - if there is valuable data for you on the drive.

+++

[HaQue]

Hi,
I fear that by letting windows do the file scans, and "fixing" your scan results.. that windows has corrupted the files.
It is not something a DR person could fix as the files are now on the drive as they are, not hidden, inaccessible or other problems a DR Engineer could recover.

at step 2) you should have copied off all the data you needed.

then again at step 3) if the drive worked, you should have copied off all data.

at step 5) you should have consulted a knowledgeable friend or a PC Shop.

This is what is called a "comedy of errors" which by the way I never understood because it is usually not funny as you found out!

I am not being mean or dissing you in any way, as we know our limits by trying to reach them, just saying how I see it.

When you(or whoever) install windows, it adds driver files to the system that interact with your hardware. This is very specific such as how to operate your mainboard, hard disk features, video card etc. If you take the hard disk out and put it into another laptop... then the system installed is EXPECTING say an intel mainboard and other hardware and SEES a totally different set. so it can either try hard to install the right software IF the system runs well enough with the mismatch, or it can simply crash.

Image getting dropped off in China blindfolded and someone rips off the blindfold and says "GO TO WORK" that's a simple analogy of whats happened here.
best bet would be now to add the drive as an external disk and clone it to an image, then at least you have a snapshot of right now so you can try methods without further killing your data.

I used Clonezilla bootable CD the other day in easy mode the steps are quite easy to follow along to create an image. There are many tools out there for this.

On a side note I am in Melbourne right now for another hour or 2 and then going back to Adelaide. If I had read this earlier I could have come had a look

could you elaborate step 16) ?
I am not sure if you mean you saved them as zip or the scan did. If the latter, then you know word excel and other office docs are actually a zip archive? If this is what it is supposed to be, try renaming the "word_doc.zip" to word_doc.docx" I don't know if this is your issue....

You might try a software such as GetDataBack, or Rstudio or a free one like "Recuva" make sure it is added as an external drive and save all recovered to a DIFFERENT drive.

good luck.

[Zaki_Anwar_Hamdani]

Well,

I know I did make mistakes but i have been travelling to six different cities in different countries during the mentioned timeline and really needed some of data present in drive

I put complete story to make sure people understand what happened. to make it simple, I can write:

I connected my working HDD to different computer and it didn't work. When I connected back to original laptop, the scan deleted some index files and now all files are present in HDD but they are corrupted.

[Zaki_Anwar_Hamdani]

@Falther: While I agree with you I would have looked for professional step at step 5, but I didn't know what future was about to bring for me....

And as I mentioned, I was travelling a lot and didn't want to hand over my precious data to somebody I didn't know.

[Zaki_Anwar_Hamdani]

@HaQue... Well, it has turned out to be "Comedy of Error" though by the time I realized it was already late and irreversible

Ste 16: What I mean is I generally zip my data to make a single file out of multiple files (why? => to make copy faster and avoid risk of getting affected with virus and to save some space and to encrypt my data).

Because of this, loss of even single bit causes CRC error while extracting zip.

[jignesh]

@HaQue... Well, it has turned out to be "Comedy of Error" though by the time I realized it was already late and irreversible

Ste 16: What I mean is I generally zip my data to make a single file out of multiple files (why? => to make copy faster and avoid risk of getting affected with virus and to save some space and to encrypt my data).

Because of this, loss of even single bit causes CRC error while extracting zip.

Dear Friend Zaki
Ur 1st Mistaq Is U Put Drive Directly On Your New Machin From Old Bcoz Every Machin Hardware Is Defrent So Ur Old Toshiba Drivers Not Runing Directly In New IBM Lappy.
Every Desktop And Laptop Hardware Profile Is Defrent U Cant Direct Swap HDD That Is Running In Defrent Machin The OS Is Gone If You Doing This.
2nd mistaq u did u run the check disk when u reinsert ur drive in old laptop but still possible ur data is recover in original condition but u need proffesional service.

Your Friend
Jignesh Pankhania

[HaQue]

ok, yes, I understand.
And also WHY you did what you did, lets forget that now as you learn from everything, good and bad.

I hope you still have that zip with CRC errors.

There is a possibility you can extract files from a zip with CRC errors. tools such as this can help:

http://www.essentialdatatools.com/products/objectfixzip/

make sure you work on a COPY of your original as to not loose the last remaining chance of recovery.

cheers

[jignesh]

ok, yes, I understand.
And also WHY you did what you did, lets forget that now as you learn from everything, good and bad.

I hope you still have that zip with CRC errors.

There is a possibility you can extract files from a zip with CRC errors. tools such as this can help:

http://www.essentialdatatools.com/products/objectfixzip/

make sure you work on a COPY of your original as to not loose the last remaining chance of recovery.

cheers

Dear Friend HaQue

May Be Winzin And Winrar Have Self Repair Fuction We Try First It Bcoz Its The Winrar Menufactorer Utility So First Trust On It.
Try To Repair Fuction Of Winrar That Is Correct All Ur Error If Possible And Check The Status And Write Back Here What Happend.

Yours Friend
Jignesh Pankhania