I wish you all the help. sending you all sorts of positive energy, good luck!

Sounds like a plan, Good luck!!

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Having a lot of horseshoes here, I can send and hopefully bring "good luck"

P.S. that's what I would have done too, more or less.

I managed to get close to 2000 clips off a hard drive I scanned. I can't get a good majority of them to play tho :/ I tried VLC but its giving me an error. Is there anything I can use to decode this like a codec or something?

Do other known good clips, in the same format, play successfully on that PC?

Depending on exactly what the original problem was, and what you did to try to recover, then those clips might actually not be usable. That situation is common in some cases, but I'll wait for more info from you before going into more detail, as there isn't enough clarification yet. I'm assuming this has nothing to do with the drive you've been discussing so far in this thread, as that one was beyond you recovering anything, wasn't it?

Here's an update from the status update..

" 01/12/2013 03:25 PM I was able to get the drive to come ready once over a dozen times. Unfortunately it would not start imaging. Drive kept clicking every time I would try. The parts are no longer working, even back in or donor drive. Need to wait till Monday to try the other sets of parts. From my Analysis of the first set I do not have high hopes for the other sets.

01/12/2013 12:22 PM Parts came in, bit only one of the the we ordered. The other two parts are coming in Monday according to fed ex. Cannot get a hold of vendor due to them being closed. Trying first set now."

Not sure what all this means..All I know is that I'm going back to praying and throwing up because of my nerves lol

- QUESTION: If the drive came ready is there anyway to retrieve the folder I need without doing a disk image?

(edit: adding in my question w/o posting another msg)

I was scanning other drives in hopes that I could get some files that might also be on the damaged drive.

The only files that work are the are files that are on the drive and haven't been deleted yet. The files that won't play give me a file size and clip length it just won't play in VLC

Please define exactly what you mean by "scanning"? (Different people will mean different things by that word.) What exactly are you doing with these other drives? Explain in detail about which software and procedures you are using.

Reading between the lines, I think you're trying to recover files from other drives which were deleted some time ago - is that correct?


I suspect this is the situation I referred to earlier as being common in some cases, but answers to the above questions are still needed, in order to try to understand what you mean.

I used photorec, easeUS and data recovery 3 to try and retrieve data deleted from other drives I have in my possession. I recovered an ample amount of clips off the drive but unfortunately I cannot play them back in vlc. The only files that work are the ones currently on the drive itself.

Lets say I recover 100 files from a drive, and 5 of those files are on the drive and were never removed. Those are the only files I can get to play the other 95 give me clip length and take up space, they just won't play..

OK, thanks, that explains things a bit more.

Yet more detail of the history of those specific drives would be needed, after the files were deleted, to try to get an even better understanding (there are 2 main possibilities and not enough detail yet to know whether option (a), or (b), or both applies - the answer can also depend on the algorithms used by those recovery programs). However in your example, the short answer is that those "95" deleted files are not actually being successfully recovered. Just having the correct filename & size (read by the recovery software from the MFT), does not mean that the file contents are completely correct.

Update....

I have gone through 3 sets of parts on this drive not one of them was able to get the drive imaging. Only the first was able to get the drive to ID , but quickly failed after that once i tried to start imaging. The other two sets pretty much failed on start up.

all three sets of parts are now dead and do not even work in the donor drives anymore.

I tried to get some pics but getting a descent shot in between the platters proved difficult as none of the pictures can really see anything.

As to the response from the client above. The reason i could not just hook the drive up and pull the data off is that the drive is encrypted. I could of tried reading it through the usb bridge to see if I could access the data, but that is not a safe manner to try and get data with crashes on the platters. Seeing the it would not even clone the other unsafe method would of failed as well.

I really wanted to get this I even came in on my birthday (Saturday) to work on it. The client paid for the weekend service, and I did not want anyone but myself to work on it.

I love a good challenge but after destroying three brand new 3tb drives, I have exhausted all my options.

for the other things you are trying with the scanning. As other have said. If the files were deleted and more data was being added to the drive after, more likely then not that data has been overwritten. The software you are using is only picking up the index info. Kinda of like opening a book and seeing the chapter list and once you get to chapter 1 there are no pages there.

The clients confirmed the original board is the one with the blown TVS as well.

I wish we could of recovered the data for you, but sometimes the drive is just to far gone for anything to work.

I really appreciate the hard work and effort.. I guess there is no way of even pulling off that single folder.. Thank you so much for all you have done especially coming in on your birthday.. I would have loved to have had a phone call rather then hearing about this news via the forum. It's okay tho. Thank you so much..

I apologize on posting this first. I was getting ready to call you as soon as I closed it out and then you called me

hello;

try sending the drive to scott , his site is
myharddrivedied.com

Is this a joke?

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Definitely the laugh of the month

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

why considered as a laugh ?

the guy is despred to have his data back , but several great recovery company have give their opinion about the drive , why not givving another shot ?

Scott Moulton has commercialised data recovery to the point where everyone thinks its easy and DIY is a viable option. He talks the talk and does it well, but as far as a recovery of this complexity goes its not something he could realistically help with in my personal opinion.

This is a good one indeed