2.5" PATA HDD problems, genius required

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4 Aug 2007
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Someone asked me to look at a laptop that wasnt booting. This had been into a shop for a repair and basically wouldnt boot when returned, the power supply had been fixed appareantly but the system wasnt booting.

I tried all the obvious but couldnt get it to work, interestingly a test from the BIOS reported the HDD was ok so I figured the guy had borked something on the motherboard so get a 2.5" PATA caddy, remove the HDD and plop it in there to allow file recovery, thats all they are after basically. They will ditch the old laptop etc once they get their photos back. Its always photos isnt it ;)

Now thats not worked, my windows isnt detecting the HDD in the caddy, yet some recovery type software etc will see it, but mis report the size of the disk, guess this is the caddy misreporting or something.

Its appearing like the boot sector and possibly the FAT table is buggered (machine was an XP OS).

So I am looking for options, is a low level file recovery likely to work, or is there anything clever that may rebuild a partition, or force a new full partition. Then is the FAT table rebuildable from scratch.

If anyone can recommend some recovery software then that would be great.

Or is it simply screwed?

Really after some useful tips if anyone has faced similar, there seems to be data on the disc but I tried to recover a few .txt files and they showed garbage.
 
when you say your windows cannot detect it do you mean

1) disk manager sees a drive but you cannot see the partitions on it
2) disk manager CANNOT see the drive
 
Worth trying 'testdisk' it's a freeware app

Make sure you're running it on the right disk though :D

It can fully recover partitions (depends how damaged the disc is)
 
Win disk manager sees the drive but basically complains about no BS/FAT. So you cannot do anything to it, it also misreports the size. Being a 2.5" is a royal pain as it means I cant just plug into mobo where I have more chance of getting correct data.
Also its a toshiba who offer next to no support on their website regarding utilities etc

I tried using testdisk, after manually adjusting the heads sectors etc (misreported at start) it then scans and fails on the partition (it cant find an old one it says). It wont let me create one either, not sure why, I just want to create a single partition for the whole disk. Cannot rebuild the FAt tables due to the partition.

:(
 
Just spoken to the guy who had the laptop and he thinks the HDD may actually have been partitioned.
Guess I may have to do the scans and deep scan a few times just in case and if that fails resort to trying a file recovery to see if that can find anything.
 
its probably jsut the file system messed up then

see if it will let you run a chkdsk, I have seen quite a few drives in that state (disk manager can see the drive, but you cannot see any partitions on it)..


for what ever reason the chkdsk will usually not run over usb, I have to attach to a ide converter cable and force a reboot / chkdsk... then it sorts a few bits and peices and it works)
 
Can't do a chkdsk as I only have a caddy for a 2.5" and not a convertor cable hence cannot go straight to motherboard of desktop

One interesting thing about testdisk is it calculates the number of sectors then goes past that point when doing a scan...
I am sure the heads, sectors etc are correct as they are from toshiba documentation, although saying that they are different on the front of the disk. But the numbers on the front of the disk would make it about 8GB and its supposed to be 20GB. Putting the values from Toshiba documentation in it gives around 17GB which I assumed was a bit of artistic licence.
 
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