HELP! Recovering data from an unmountable HDD

[MattyD]

I'm in deep, deep ish with a b0rked HDD and would seriously appreciate some help / advice

My PC suddenly powered down whilst booting up the other day and now it won't boot at all. When I switch on it goes through the BIOS as normal but about a second after the Windows XP loading screen appears, it goes to a blue screen of death with an error message about 'unmountable boot device' (the last word may be something different like 'sector', can't remember ATM).

I know I can fix this the hard way by formatting and reinstalling the drive, but I really can't afford to lose the data on there. I've tried plugging the disc into another PC and offloading the data that way but it just comes up as a blank drive that needs formatting.

If anybody knows of any tricks / workarounds / software that might be able to recover the data from this HDD I would be eternally grateful. I have everything on this disc from wedding photos to coursework and I really can't afford to lose them

[RustyS Badge]

Sounds like the boot sector is ****ed. You could try installing another OS (which is what I did once when I had the same problem) . Saying that though as you've already hooked it up to another PC it might be fooked. Are you positive it was set up right as slave?

Theres a couple fo things you can try from the recovery console first. Boot from your XP (or whatever OS you have) CD and select recovery console.

Then try fixmbr and fixboot

[Chunky]

When you put the other drive in another PC, i presume the other PC boots and sees that another drive is there, it just can't read it ? If that's the case you should be able to use some software to recover most, if not all the data from the disk. I had this happen before and got everything back, reformatted the disk and off i went again

[babs]

Have you got access to another PC? download and use a linux LiveCD from most of the major distributions. It'll boot with no hard disk, and should mount the windows disk once it starts up. You should be able to see what's on the disk and back it up, burn it to cd or whatever.

[MattyD]

Thanks for the suggestions so far guys.

I tried Rusty's suggestions and the machine can now read the disc, although it's not showing anything up (obviously, as it has a new, blank boot table).

I'm using my old man's PC now to download a Linux CD but I'm not sure if that will help, as the damaged part of the HDD is the part which remembers what files are on there and where they are physically located.

I know there must be some software out there to recover lost / 'deleted' data as it's still physically on the disc, it just doesn't know where to find it. AFAIK they use this sort of software to catch out Gary Glitter and his chums by recovering 'deleted' files

When you put the other drive in another PC, i presume the other PC boots and sees that another drive is there, it just can't read it ? If that's the case you should be able to use some software to recover most, if not all the data from the disk. I had this happen before and got everything back, reformatted the disk and off i went again

So what software did you use?

[Jebus]

This might be a silly thing to say, but if you want to recover the data, have you tried removing the HDD and sticking it in a USB HDD Caddy? Then plug it into another PC and just copy the data off? It worked for me when my HDD went tits up and I used my laptop to recover it all via HDD Caddy...

That would mean the 2nd PC/Laptop/Whatever is literally reading it as a "USB Mass storage device" and you could just browse the HDD as such? Though I'm not sure it'd work since you're saying it can't locate any files and such?

As I say, not sure it'd help but it's worth a go...

[Magnakai]

It sounds to me like the header type sector's b0rked, so while the files are still physically on the drive, there's no way of accessing them at the moment.

I'd imagine (not having done this myself) that it's not in the harder realm of things to fix. If the data's crucial I'd take it to a data recovery service quite literally asap. The more you mess with it the more likely it's going to properly screw up. It will be expensive though.

There could be programs to fix it, but not having used any myself I'm not going to make any blind recommendations.

I will say good luck though! I hope it works out for you.

[Chunky]

I used Runtime Softwares GetDataBack, worked a charm. I think that's what it's called anyway!!

[MattyD]

Thanks for all your suggestions guys. In the end, unfortunately, it turned out that the hardware itself had failed so everything on the disc is screwed, short of sending it to the Gary Glitter squad / NSA / or paying about a grand for a data recovery company just to look at it. That's before they even recover anything, if indeed that is possible. C'est la vie etc etc.

[amorenod]

Amazing. We recently had a problem with an old server, and sent a hot swap scsi HDD to a data recovery company (in Spain). The day later got a mail with details to download a personalized preliminary test, with number of files, type, status, etc, free of charge.