Recovery data from crashed harddisk

The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.
Only "Spotmau Data Recovery 2011" does find the disk (version 2012
doesn't, strange...) but after 18 hours the remaining time was not less
than 1820 hours!!
There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).
Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??
Thanks so much!!!
(And sorry for my bad English language!!)

On 04/01/15 10:17, Carpe Diem wrote:
The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.
Only "Spotmau Data Recovery 2011" does find the disk (version 2012
doesn't, strange...) but after 18 hours the remaining time was not less
than 1820 hours!!
There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).
Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??
Thanks so much!!!
(And sorry for my bad English language!!)

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

--

Jeff

Carpe Diem wrote:

The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash

If the document is *so* important and the user has no experience of
recoveringng information from failed disks and filesystems, the best
advice is turn it off, leave it turned off, then find someone who knows
how to recover it, it is easy to do more harm than good.

There *are* ways for the user to attempt recovery themselves, but make
sure they understand the above first.

Andy Burns schreef op 4/01/2015 om 13:19:
Carpe Diem wrote:

The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash

If the document is *so* important and the user has no experience of
recoveringng information from failed disks and filesystems, the best
advice is turn it off, leave it turned off, then find someone who knows
how to recover it, it is easy to do more harm than good.

There *are* ways for the user to attempt recovery themselves, but make
sure they understand the above first.


That's the reason for my cry for help in this NG ;-))

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

OK, thanks! I'll take a look...

--
Mvg,
Carpe Diem
"De dingen moeten zo eenvoudig mogelijk gemaakt worden,
maar niet eenvoudiger (Albert Einstein)."

On 01/04/2015 04:17 AM, Carpe Diem wrote:
The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.
Only "Spotmau Data Recovery 2011" does find the disk (version 2012
doesn't, strange...) but after 18 hours the remaining time was not less
than 1820 hours!!
There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).
Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??
Thanks so much!!!
(And sorry for my bad English language!!)



Boot with a Linux live cd and if the drive is readable, copy the needed
file to a USB thumb drive

Carpe Diem wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

There *are* ways for the user to attempt recovery themselves, but make
sure they understand the above first.

That's the reason for my cry for help in this NG ;-))

Of course, but best to make the daughter whose data may be already gone
or is at further risk of going, aware of the extra risks first, rather
than tempt them into possibly ill-advised tinkering. Would the document
be worth paying to retrieve? How much? At least think of a sensible
answer ...

Did the disk crash due to being dropped/bashed? Or has just failed for
an "unknown" reason?

For any recovery I would take the disk out of the original computer, and
add it as a second disk to another computer, which has plenty of space
to copy any recoverable contents onto.

My first tool of choice would be photorec, you need some familiarity
with "DOS" software, but all it attempts to do is read anything that is
readable from the "dead" disk, it doesn't attempt to fix anything on the
disk, so if it doesn't succeed the risk of having made professional
repair more difficult are small, it retrieves the "easy" stuff first and
you can leave it going for hours or days in an attempt to retrieve the
"hard" stuff.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

philo wrote on 1/4/2015 7:45 AM:
On 01/04/2015 04:17 AM, Carpe Diem wrote:
The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.
Only "Spotmau Data Recovery 2011" does find the disk (version 2012
doesn't, strange...) but after 18 hours the remaining time was not less
than 1820 hours!!
There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).
Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??
Thanks so much!!!
(And sorry for my bad English language!!)



Boot with a Linux live cd and if the drive is readable, copy the needed
file to a USB thumb drive

I guess you missed the comment from the OP that Linux Live CDs do not find anything.

On Sun, 04 Jan 2015 11:17:50 +0100, Carpe Diem wrote:

There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).

She must feel pretty stupid by now...

Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??

Have you tried TestDisk?

A while ago friend of mine brought his 2TB external drive to me. After a
power failure he wasn't able to access the drive. It wasn't recognized,
not under Windows, nor under Linux.

I took the drive out of the casing and connected to an old (Linux) PC,
SATA should be faster than USB2.0, right? I ran TestDisk. It recognized
the drive and it took about 12 hours to recover every file (there was
about 1TB of data, mainly AVI, on the drive). I then copied all the
files from the "broken" drive to another (external) drive.

In the end, I was able to recover all the data, even data that he
deleted. TestDisk is in English and you can run it under Windows or
Linux. You can find a step-by-step guide he
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

--
s|b

On 01/04/2015 08:02 AM, Big_Al wrote:
philo wrote on 1/4/2015 7:45 AM:
On 01/04/2015 04:17 AM, Carpe Diem wrote:
The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.
Only "Spotmau Data Recovery 2011" does find the disk (version 2012
doesn't, strange...) but after 18 hours the remaining time was not less
than 1820 hours!!
There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).
Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??
Thanks so much!!!
(And sorry for my bad English language!!)



Boot with a Linux live cd and if the drive is readable, copy the needed
file to a USB thumb drive

I guess you missed the comment from the OP that Linux Live CDs do not find anything.




Ooops yep I missed that


Any, if the document was not backed up
it was not as important as the person thinks it is

On 01/04/2015 08:25 AM, s|b wrote:
On Sun, 04 Jan 2015 11:17:50 +0100, Carpe Diem wrote:

There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).

She must feel pretty stupid by now...

Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??

Have you tried TestDisk?

A while ago friend of mine brought his 2TB external drive to me. After a
power failure he wasn't able to access the drive. It wasn't recognized,
not under Windows, nor under Linux.

I took the drive out of the casing and connected to an old (Linux) PC,
SATA should be faster than USB2.0, right? I ran TestDisk. It recognized
the drive and it took about 12 hours to recover every file (there was
about 1TB of data, mainly AVI, on the drive). I then copied all the
files from the "broken" drive to another (external) drive.

In the end, I was able to recover all the data, even data that he
deleted. TestDisk is in English and you can run it under Windows or
Linux. You can find a step-by-step guide he
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step




Yep

TestDisk is a great utility

though it's free, it worked so well I gladly sent them a contribution

On Sun, 04 Jan 2015 11:17:50 +0100, Carpe Diem wrote:

The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.
Only "Spotmau Data Recovery 2011" does find the disk (version 2012
doesn't, strange...) but after 18 hours the remaining time was not less
than 1820 hours!!
There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).
Can anyone give some hints to try a recovery??
Thanks so much!!!
(And sorry for my bad English language!!)

I'd suggest either 1) hand it over to a Linux geek who really knows what
he's doing (I've recovered three dead drives in the past) or 2) send it
off to a data recovery service.

"Carpe Diem" wrote in message
...

The daughter of a colleague is panicking : due to a harddiskcrash her
laptop gives a "disk error" on startup.
Windows repair (W7 Ultimate 32-bit) doesn't do anything.
Most of the recovery programs (boot-disks) I tried do not even find the
disk. Linux Live CDs do not find anything.

Old rules (from DOS 1985) for recovering data from
crashed disks.
1. Do not boot from the damaged disk. Connect it
as an extra drive to some other computer.
2. Do not work directly on the damaged disk. Clone
it (by a disk utility for this purpose) including bad
sectors and everything else.
3. Work only on the copy. Then if anything alters
the copy inadvertently, you can make a fresh clone
and resume work.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

On 1/4/2015 7:38 AM, ray carter wrote:

I'd suggest either 1) hand it over to a Linux geek who really knows what
he's doing (I've recovered three dead drives in the past) or 2) send it
off to a data recovery service.

#2 would be probably costly compared to #1.
--
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organized mass warfare." --Charles H. Maskins
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Ant is currently not listening to any songs on this computer.

Il Sun, 04 Jan 2015 11:17:50 +0100, Carpe Diem ha scritto:

There is ONE extremely important Word document on the disk and she does
NOT have a back-up (of course not...).

drop any DIY workaround and send the disk to Kroll Ontrack



--
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