Data recovery problem

ubersonic

ubersonic

ubersonic

Soldato
Joined
26 May 2009
Posts
22,229
Friend of mine gave me a hard drive claiming it had gone screwy and they needed important files on it, hadn't tried anything like this in years but thought I would have a go. Under disk management it can see the main partition however it appears as RAW not NTFS, the old test-disk program can see it as an NTFS partition which it says is good but cannot list the directory's/files however its sister program Photorec can copy files off it fine.

However rather than dump the data from an entire 500GB partition into randomly named folders on a good drive I would much prefer to try and get this partition readable so I can just copy off what's needed.

Any help? Thanks.
 
I cant think of a safe way of retrieving the partition, if I was you I would just dump the lot somewhere and then pull out what you need and delete the rest, messing about with it has the potential to screw over the whole partition totally and make it all unreadable.

Hawker
 
oops sorry thats no good it it does not see the drive letter...

attach it to a sata / ide cable on a workign amchine and boot, windows will likely see there is an issue and do a chkdsk..
 
Its connected on a sata cable in my Vista machine, Windows can't acess the partition though. Ironically I have managed to recover the Acer recovery partition on the disk but not the main partition where the needed data is >.< lol

Its pretty sad I used to be really good at this stuff like a decade ago :(
 
ubersonic said:
Its connected on a sata cable in my Vista machine, Windows can't acess the partition though. Ironically I have managed to recover the Acer recovery partition on the disk but not the main partition where the needed data is >.< lol

Its pretty sad I used to be really good at this stuff like a decade ago :(
Click to expand...

does it show as a partition?

if it does try a chkdsk /f - it may get stuck for ages leve it overnight...
 
try a live linux OS

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

follow the instructions and boot into the live version which runs from the CD or USB stick

in the file manager you should see the drive (mount it... which is a simple click on drive symbol) and see/access any files on it. It totally disregards any Windows user file permissions :)

I use it a lot (from a bootable usb stick) to recover peeps data without having to mount thier drive in any of my machines - hope this helps
 
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Yeah ive tried mounting it from Linux but that doesn't work either, im now dumping all the files to an external drive with photorec, its going to be a joy searching randomly named directories for randomly named files but its something I guess lol.
 
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