Of course I meant buttered lol But I know there's always an outside chance... I'm trying to retrieve data from an HDD from a Dell laptop. There are no backups unfortunately and my poor dad is learning the hard way about this as we speak.
To fill you in...

The HDD is a Seagate ST916031AS and chkdsk didn't work. I loaded Ubuntu in the hopes of retrieving info this way, no such luck. SeaTools for DOS rejected it saying there were probably bad sectors, recommending a low level format or a zero fill. Still not quite sure what these are...

I then did an MHDD scan at boot, which is where the nail seems to have been conclusively nailed in the poor HDD's coffin, at least on the face of it... Nothing but brown and the occasional pink blobs come up on the scan - which estimates taking 130 hours btw!!... (I don't think I can complete the scan and publish the report here unfortunately, need to use the pc)

I scanned a working drive just in case there was some error with MHDD but no such luck... the scan zipped along with dotty black 3ms blobs....

So I returned to the bad drive and scanned again, and used the arrow keys to scroll through the disk scan, at every point it reported brown, occasionally pink blobs. RIGHT UP TO 99%!!

Now I'm having to do a lot of learning very quickly so please bear with me... but can anyone help me interpret the scan results and help me understand what's happened to the HDD?? Such a universally corrupted drive seems so odd!! I thought it may be a firmware issue in that case??

Will zero fill or low level format really help here? I gather low level format can allow you to recover any data more easily as this identifies the bad sectors and closes them down?? But I have to say in this case all seems in vain.. What do you think??

Any help really appreciated. Many thanks in advance,
Tony

An odd thing... I have slaved the bad drive to a windows XP machine, from which I ran all the diagnostics. Well within windows I can read and write from one of the partitions on the bad drive, called 'Recovery', used by DELL, however on the MHDD scan it reported very consistently the whole drive surface had many hundreds of errors....

Okay. Stop what you are doing and get your drive assessed by a data recovery pro. The steps you have taken, thus far, likely have only caused minimal damage, but any further attempts may cause the data to be completely unrecoverable...especially if you low level format the drive.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

I have to lab recommendations in the UK that comes to mind:

www.pcimage.co.uk & www.databusters.co.uk

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

+1 to lcoughey. But as long you can read sectors, make sector by sector copy to not smaller drive (use DMDE), then you can try to repair file system on the good drive.
And when data is off, you can zero fill, whatever...

Yes my instincts were sound it seems. Before you guys had time to helpfully reply I did in fact call the Data Recoverers, a local firm who seemed to take their reputation quite seriously.... we shall see!

Without intending to tempt fate I have been lucky enough not to have dealt personally with many dead drives, perhaps if I had I would have seen the signs a little earlier and stopped tinkering. Oh well, I do appreciate lcoughey pointing out I've likely done minimal further damage to the disk - I do so hate blundering into things and f**king them up even more!

Honestly, I've spent a considerable time in the past making automatic backups my dad really should have known better!

As I said, we shall see! Thanks very much for your replies.
Tony