I tried to go through every FAQ (the firmware one was quite enlightening) that I could read that pertained to hard drive crash issues but I'm perfectly capable of missing something or not realizing what I was reading could have solved my problem so be kind to a newbie. Plus, it seems a lot harder to find information on logical issues rather than physical ones. Anyways onto my issue:

I am in the process of "repurposing" 3 machines since I just built a new box. So, I had backed up all data for the old machines on one hard drive until I had a chance to put it all back. However, in the process of making a ghost of one of the new machine images, Ghost crashed and the hard drive, which was in a USB enclosure, is no longer accessible.

It was a close to full 320GB (~20GB of free space left) hard drive (Maxtor DiamondMax 21) in an external enclosure, being used as a USB hard drive for backups of a few different systems (6 in total, I belive) and I hadn't gotten a chance to make a second copy of all the backup as it hadn't been completely sorted. So, I am looking for as close to total data recovery as possible. Time is not as important as completeness- as I would really like to get as close to 100% as possible, even if it takes time.

I tried to hook it in as a USB, slave it out in one of the other machines via IDE, and tried to read it as a USB drive in Linux (Knoppix) but it could not be seen. In Windows, it shows it as an unallocated drive so it's almost certainly a logical and not physical issue. I have no reason to believe it's a physical issue as the disk was less than a year old and the reason why there is an issue seems to be from Ghost.

I ran a thorough scan on Partition Find and Mount and all it found was 1 39GB partition. Now, I'm a little leary of restoring/mounting that partition as I'm not sure if that will lessen my chances of finding the rest of the data on the disk. I'm a novice at disk recovery mainly because I tended to do good on keeping backups so it was never necessary- a drive died, I always had a good backup until now.

So, in short- I'm looking at a disk that more that likely still has all the data on it but just can't find it. However, I'm not sure where to start mucking into this where I wouldn't just be slogging around, ruining any chance I had at close to full data recovery.

Cost is somewhat of an issue as, since I don't do this for a living, I don't think I can throw a couple thousand bucks at a piece of software to do this once- I might as well have some mailaway service do it for me for half that. But I don't mind paying for a good piece of software that is really likely to help me out, doesn't have a grueling learning curve, and that I would have around for any future "data incidents".

Thanks in advance for any and all help, any suggestions on software and any methods on how to proceed

SI

make a clone or image of the drive, then you can try whatever you like with no worries of losing anything. there are plenty of cheapish softwares out there that can probably retrieve all of your data.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

ddrescue will clone the drive, testdisk will likely bring the data back online. Failing that, getdataback would probably have good results.

Don't do anything without a sector-level clone of the drive. If there are bad sectors, Ghost will fail while ddrescue will skip them.

Thanks for the advice. I will try that out this weekend

SI