wrote:
On Fri, 06 Oct 2017 21:49:40 -0400, Paul wrote:

wrote:
On Fri, 06 Oct 2017 12:55:40 -0400, Paul wrote:

wrote:
My failed HDD is a Maxtor, so I went to Google and searched for "Maxtor
hard drive repair software". Almost half of the search results were for
EaseUS data recovery software. (Even claiming to be the official
software for Maxtor drives). EaseUs may or may not be worthwhile, but
it's very costly, and their so called "free" data recovery software is
limited to 2gb of recovery. It's becoming more and more apparent that
google has sold out to companies who pay them to the most, and EaseUs
must be one of those companies.

I guess it's time to find another search engine and dump google into the
nearest **** hole.

That's because Google knows, by the time you locate such
a software, the Maxtor drive will have died by then, and
no longer be accessible :-(

It's ddrescue ("gddrescue") package now... or forget it.
Kiss that data goodbye. I have the dead 40GB Maxtor drive(s)
here to prove it.

*******

I also still have Maxtor drives (in the old computers) that
still work. I even have a Quantum Fireball in one of the
machines. I always liked the marketing name for that thing.
As the description neatly covers anything bad that can
ever happen ("you didn't know it was a Fireball?").

Marketing is an art.

(PowMax power supply)

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16817163018

https://images10.newegg.com/NeweggIm...163-018-06.JPG

Now, if one of those catches fire, the company can say
"didn't you see our promotional material ? It's suppose
to work that way".

Paul
It's not gonna die any more than it is now. It's not plugged in. My
other HDD does all the booting. In fact I already have my new HDD
installed I backed up the two good partitions on that bad drive, (H: and
I. I backed them up twice. Later tonite, I plan to copy my H: amd I:
partitions data to the new drive.

I dont plan to plug in that bad drive anymore. If I have to rely on
Linux, I will rather pay a professional to save my data, before having
to buy a DVD burner and all of that, and then finding out I cant get
Linux to work. I did do one thing, I booted my XP machine with a
bootable flash drive that I have with an old version of Pc-Linux on it.
That is the only Linux that has ever sort of worked for me and made
sense as well, since it looks like Windows. Anyhow, I had that bad drive
plugged in, and Linux showed all the folders in gibberish, and clicking
on them gave me an error. XP and Win2000 both refuse to access that
partition at all, just tells me to format it. Win98 still sees it, but
over half the folders are missing.

Fortunately, I moved a large chunk of the data that was on the bad
partition (G to my I: partition a few months ago. I forgot that I did
that. I did it because G: was getting to full. Comparing to my old
backups, I am probably only lacking about 6gb. I dont know how much they
charge to save data, per gb, but that really reduces what needs to be
saved. Mostly just the one large folder with many sub folders. But there
are 2 other folders that have some new data. Everything else on that
partition is on my old backups.

Now, to find a reliable data recovery service......

You don't need a DVD burner for Linux.

The Live Image can be copied to a USB stick. The latest
versions (last several years) are called "hybrid", and they
happen to boot on legacy BIOS and UEFI BIOS, and the image
was designed so that if copied sector by sector, on top of
a USB stick, you plug in the USB stick and it boots.

Of the seven USB flash sticks sitting in front of me,
two of them contain a Linux ISO and nothing else. And when
Windows makes a file hard to delete, I just pop one of those
into the back of the machine, and in a couple of minutes,
job is done.

Machines before around 2005 or so, don't have USB boot,
and in that case, a CD would work. I even have a machine
only a couple years older than that, where the BIOS doesn't
know how to boot from a DVD drive, and can only boot
from a CD drive (it won't even flash the LED on the
DVD drive). And then the Linux images can only
be 700MB (CD size limit). And they haven't been that
small for some time. Currently mainstream Linux ISOs
are 1.6GB or so. I'd have to use Puppy Linux to get one
on a CD small enough.

This is an example of the Puppy family, only with perhaps
a newer kernel on it. For example, actual Puppy discs, have
no drivers at all for my most modern PC (the Puppy might
use a 2.6 kernel or so, when the current kernel is
around 4.4). The Fatdog one would be a little bit more modern.
This one boots on 64-bit processors.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/iso/

Fatdog64-710.iso 2016-Dec-03 10:04:55 360MB

But you would only mess with that one, if absolutely
desperate.

There is little profit in really old computers now. You
gotta know a lot to beat some function out of them. And
if you've never done stuff like this on a six year old
machine, using a twenty year old machine is not the place
to start. There are just too many gotchas. I *like*
old computers, but nobody else in the industry does.
That's why they put SSE2 requirements in all the
software, the dumbasses. To get that old machine to
boot, I had to *install* Linux on a hard drive on a
modern machine, then move the drive to the old
computer. And then it would boot. I never expected
to have that much trouble, but that's what happens
when you dig some old gear out of the junk pile.

*******

Now, because I didn't really help you at all there,
here's a link to get you started. This will help you
get that downloaded ISO onto the USB stick, with
little to no sweat.

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6062-rufus.html

Bon appetit,

Paul

Just for the heck of it, I plugged that drive into my newest XP machine
as a slave, and am running Recurva. I wont let it write to the drive,
but I want to see if I can pull any data off. So far I've waited over an
hour for it to do anything, and is still trying.

I still have an urge to let Norton Utilities (Disk Doctor) do what it
wants to do to the FAT, but it seems risky. Yet that software was made
for that era system and OS.

I have two bootable USB sticks. One is Puppy, the other is an older
version of PC-Linux. Puppy has gotten me out of a bind several times
when files get "stuck". Better yet, when I had a motherboard die and was
unable to transplant the HDD to another machine (XP), I was able to get
my data off the drive. (Win98 drives can be transplanted quite easily).

I do like PC-Linux better though. The layout is almost just like
Windows. I could learn to use that OS almost on a full time basis. (But
only that older version, they dont even make a 32 bit version anymore).
That's too bad too, because they had a decent product.

Yea, I dont understand why all the new linux need to be so huge.

Some years ago, I used some sort of program to make those bootable flash
drives. Unibooten or something like that. I should still have that
software, but aside from those 2 sticks, I quit trying linux. All the
big ones would never boot. However, even PC-Linux wont boot on the
default, I have to use the VESA mode, so I assume the problem is video
related. I recall trying Mint, which caused the whole computer to
freeze.

I did download ddrescue in a zip. It installed on XP and dont seem to do
anything except make a graph on the screen. I thought it was the ISO
file, so I am not sure where to get that. Plus I cant do it on dialup
anyhow. I know some linux you can buy a CD or DVD, but not that one from
what I saw on Distrowatch. Then again, I dont think my drive is for DVDs
anyhow, just CDs, and it's only a reader.

Can ddrescue be made bootable on a USB stick? Can I use that Unebooten?
(Of course first I will need to get the proper ISO.

In many ways, I think I should just get a pro to do this for me. Loosing
that data will really screw up my home business, and before I spend a
bunch of money on software or DVD machines, or whatever, I'm willing to
pay some company knowing I have a better chance of getting my data back.

All I do know, is fron now on, I will backup more than twice a year. The
problem is that with my old computer, I only have USB 1, and that takes
up to 3 days to back up all 7 partitions. I do it overnight, but it's
still real slow. However, pluggig this bad drive into my much newer XP
machine, I was able to backup H: and I: in less than a half hour. My E:
partition is 70gb and that one takes around 16 hours to backup using USB
1. That's the worst one.

Thanks for trying to help! I'm no geek, so a lot of this stuff goes
right over my head....



If your older machine has a PCI card slot, you can
get a USB2 card for around $10. Depending on the
whims of the sellers.

You can also get a USB3 card for PCI, but they are
quite expensive. Could be as much as $100 for one of those.
The way those work, is the card has two chips (big deal, right).

One chip converts PCI bus to PCI Express. The PCI bus is
limited to around 100MB/sec of practical transfer rate.
Next, a PCI Express USB3 chip is connected. The card
looks like this.

--- PCI to PCI Express ------- PCI Express to USB3 --- (two or four connectors)

The parts cost for that might be $5 for the first chip
and maybe $5 for the second chip. But because they
don't make very many of the cards, the cards end up
with quite high prices. Really too expensive to be
slapping into old computers (which is the intention
when building cards like that).

The normal high volume cards are like this.

--- PCI Express to USB3 --- (two or four connectors)
for x1 slot

and might cost $20-$25 or so. But if your old
computer doesn't have that x1 slot, and is too old to
have had PCI Express, things get a *lot* more expensive.

Your options:

USB 1.1 - 1MB/sec practical transfer rate (my Mac G4 does this!)

USB 2.0 - 30MB/sec practical transfer rate
- readily available as a PCI card, and cheap

USB 3.0 - 100MB/sec as a PCI card
- 400MB/sec+ as a PCI Express x1 Rev2 card

Examples:

1) The USB3 for PCI (100MB/sec) card. This one has a floppy
power connector, for an older computer. The aux power is a good
idea if using the ports for charging, or known large electrical
loads. I don't have the aux power connected on mine. The aux
power on mine, is a 15 pin SATA power connector (older power
supplies don't have that connector, and you need a molex to
sata cable to handle that case). Don't panic, if you select
a card that only has the 15 pin power, as you can buy an adapter
cable to drive it. Since this card also has the floppy connector,
your PSU may have a floppy connector to use instead.

PCI to USB3 four port $62
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16815158361

*Don't* buy one of those, without driver support. The
driver support list is:

Windows XP(32/64-bit)
Server 2003(32/64-bit)
Server 2008 R2
Vista(32/64-bit)
Win7(32/64-bit) --- OS needs driver, no native USB3 support
Win8(32/64-bit) --- OS should have driver already

2) PCI to USB2 four port $13
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIA1JM2F46982

Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1, Linux, Mac OS

It's possible the OS has the driver already, if you have
at least WinXP SP3. I suspect there's no driver CD in the box,
as it's not in the picture.

When you add cards like that, you cannot boot from them.

Your USB 1.1 port, I'm not aware of any USB 1.1 ports
that booted. Booting from USB became a feature in the
USB2 era. If a machine has USB2 ports in the I/O plate
area, the odds are a lot better that those will boot
a USB key.

HTH,
Paul