Pulling Files off a Failing/Failed HDD

Status
Not open for further replies.
LazyD

LazyD

$monies = false;
Dec 7, 2006
655
12
0
Wine Cuntry
wildfoxmedia.com
My Dell laptop is less then a year old. I was on my laptop for the first part of yesterday, during the second half of the day I went out for dinner, etc. When I came back, my laptop had a BSOD on it and froze.

I restarted, only to get a nice 'Invalid partition table', I tried frantically restarting a number of times to the same result.

I ended up running the Dell Utility tool and it showed that my HDD had failed the Disk Self Test with a nice error string. I ran that info through Google and low-n-behold that error message is associated with a hard drive that has just flat ass failed.

I contacted Dell Support and since its still under warranty they are sending me a new hard drive, however, theres still the issue of my files. Most of my super important client files/code is in my subversion server offsite. However, there are still a number of files that I would like to get if at all possible. Whats the best route to go about trying to pull files onto an external hdd assuming I cant get to windows at all.

Also, can anyone reccomend me some backup software for down the line?
 


On XP I've used Hard Drive Mechanic successfully in the past as well as free utility called UBCD4Win which allows you to create a bootable CD containing utilities that might allow you to retrieve your files.
 
Download a copy of hiren's boot CD.
Head to the backups section and run anything but norton ghost(I think acronis has some good software on there. Might be a different place though). Make your backup(most support usb drives)

If it fails or locks up, there's also some software on there to try and recover bad sectors and partitions and whatnot.
 
I purchased an USB based HDD controller a while ago (pretty cheap like $10-20), this allows you to connect an external drive via a USB cable and have it appear as a drive on your computer.

Not sure if you have one of those, but when you get the new drive installed, you could then attached the old drive via USB and check to see if the files you want are still available and simply copy them to your new drive.

Depends what kind of drive you have, but something like this would do the trick:
Newegg.com - Link Depot USB2-SATA USB2.0 TO IDE/SATA Adapter Cable - Adapters & Gender Changers

Mubs
 
I believe we had a chat bout this already before it failed completely but the only way to recover data from a mechanically failed hdd is to use a slow spin data recovery software. The one I use most often is called Spin Rite. There are others though. Basically what they do is, they spin the harddrive slower than normal and attempt to repair the magnetic states of the sectors, ie if a sector has 60% north polarity and 40% south(which would consider it an unreadable sector) it'll switch it to a true state making it readable. Also with it spinning slower it gives the mechanical arm which might be tapping out time to reach the disastered sectors.

The alternative is expensive.
 
I second spinrite. But on some computers it wont read the drive for some reason. At least with my SATA drive laptop. No problems ever with 3.5 drives. But that might just be my luck. It is slow as anything as it reads the whole drive many times and looks for errors. Tries to correct them. If it cant it moves as much of the data as possible and rewrites the SMART map.

Or the HDD enclosure idea is good. You need to determine if you have SATA or IDE before you go get one. Defintely need a 2.5" one.
 
if u have a external HD, download a ubuntu live CD. If your HD is not dead, you should be able to transfer ur file to external HD after you boot ubuntu from CD
 
Live CD ftw...

Thanks guys for all your suggestions, I ended up going with a Knoppix Live CD (I was going to use Ubuntu but the god damn download was taking fucking forever)

I managed to get pretty much everything I needed off the hard drive (Except for programs of course)
 
Worst case scenario, and the software doesn't work, you can take it in to a professional service that offers MFM imagery and get them to pull the 1s and 0s directly, and rebuild it all onto a fresh drive.
This is not something you can do at home, and it will cost you a fair bit... But if all of your AM info is on that thing, then it's money well spent.

Anyway, as trite as it is to say "well you should have had a backup drive", seriously, these days, with the speeds of eSATA drives, and the sheer capacity, as well as the low low prices, there's no reason not to.
The one I'm going to be getting for my new comp is the Drobo from Data Robotics, Inc.
Cascading backups, hot swapping of the drive, and they can be of any size, so long as they're larger than your internal storage drive.
 
Harvey, I managed to get all the data that I know I really needed/wanted so im taking that as a win.

In the future, I would definitely like to setup some kind of automated/semi-automated backup. I have a WD 250GB Passport USB hard drive, I guess I just need the software to manage the backups.

The other thing I was looking into was the possibiliy of getting in on Amazons storage service.
 
Eli, ive read mostly negative things about WD Sync - I guess if anything its going ot be a matter of self control and setting at the least, a weekly reminder in Outlook/Calendar to make a backup.

Or schedule Windows to do it....
 
On a related issue. Make Backups!@ Cheaper and easier than ever.

I just bought a one terabyte drive for $110! Pirates Bay be scared....
 
funny, my harddrive in my 6 month old Dell Latitude D830 just failed. it was a fujitsu 7200 rpm 80gb drive. I haven't had a drive fail that quickly in a long time...

Run offsite backups and ghost your drive once in a while to another HD!
 
Regarding backups, I was just playing with Acronis Home version and it looks pretty good, a lot of options (includind sector by sector image, scheduled backups and more) and is pretty fast.
 
Ill take a look at that stuff....

The one big downside ive heard about the WD Sync is that it stores all of your files in a single encrypted CAB file that really cant be opened without the use of WD Sync...
 
TLott said:
funny, my harddrive in my 6 month old Dell Latitude D830 just failed. it was a fujitsu 7200 rpm 80gb drive. I haven't had a drive fail that quickly in a long time...

Run offsite backups and ghost your drive once in a while to another HD!
Click to expand...

any recommendations for ghosting your drive? does norton ghost work well?
 
One warning to everyone trying to do this.
If your main drive is NTFS and you're doing a direct file copy(not an image) make sure the backup drive is NTFS. Windows does not enjoy it's file losing their metadata/ownership info and whatnot..
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom