Data Recovery Specialist

pc-guy

pc-guy

pc-guy

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2005
Posts
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Anyone can recommend a data recovery specialist that's relatively cheap and can guarantee recovery?

basically my networked storage was filled (3TB), i bought a 6TB to replace it. and got a clone station to do the job (Icybox). unfortunately the clone station has managed to corrupt the 3TB drive. so when i try to read the drive the partition is in RAW format. I used chkdsk to correct any errors. now i can see the folder structure at 1st level with no sub-folders and I lost over 90% of the data.

I have ran a number of recovery program - ontrak, easeus etc to no avail.

so If anyone has any ideas please let me know
 
Send it to the doc! http://www.drsuk.com/

At a previous company our forensics department used to use him if they couldn't manage. We used to call him "Dr Sucks" hehehe

Childish humour aside. He was very good.
 
just an update, I managed to get aout 2.2TB out of 2.9TB back through chkdsk repair.

I also ran minitools data recovery and found some hidden directories under chkdsk repair folder found.001 - which is where most of the data is at.

basically it seems i lost the entire root directory folder structure, but the next level down is all preserved. so I am just transferring that across to 6TB drive in windows now. I also had to change he user rights on the folders to gain access. but some of the directories are still locked out. I am not sure what is going on there.

I will probably run a HDD diagnostic and do a low level format as well and then try to rerun some of the tools like ontrack recovery.
 
I'm not sure CHKDSK was the right thing to do. In another thread, I mentioned that I wiped one of my drives by messing about with storage spaces. The data was all there but the partition table was lost which sounds similar to your problem. So I didn't do anything that would cause any changes to the drive and ran Piriform Recuva. It took 36 hours from scanning the drive and then copying 1TB of data to a new drive - at USB 2 speeds thanks to my ancient PC GAH! - but I got 95% of my data back.
 
well, my problem was that the drive showed up as RAW format. all of the tools i used to recover the file cannot read into the partition. all of them showed up the drive is filled and no file structures under the root.

I then used a program called TestDisk, ran it for nearly 3 days and was the same problem - can see the drive is full but cannot see the partitions. From the testdisk forum I found out similar problems as mine. The forum threads all suggested to do a chkdsk fix.

the chkdsk basically fixed the partition format and it also tried to fix the MFT but did a really bad job. I don't think chkdsk will fundamentally alter the state of the drive too much. it basically did a partition repair and tried to rebuilt the MFT and removed a lot of bad links to folders and files. So ultimately the data themselves have not been altered just the index effectively. at least thats whay my impression of the process is from the log file.

the drive can be read from windows now and I would say I have retained around 80% data out of which some files had become corrupt (a very small percentage) and unreadable. so it wasn't too bad.

Basically this is the second time my networked disk has failed in an Icybox - previous one as a NAS enclosure. and last time I totally lost my data due to raid controller failing. So i have no confidence in Icybox as a brand and that I do think they put some really cheap nasty controller chipset in their box or just shoddy components.
 
I think mine was RAW too but I just did a "create simple volume" and then "quick format" to get an NTFS partition table back and then ran the Recuva software. As I say, it then recovered 95% or so which is great for a free piece of software.
 
Qnap boxes are pretty decent nas boxes

I used partition magic boot cd to do data recovery, it is pretty effective (even for weird stuff like mac format disks)

If you use a specialist company, you will pay a ton of money
 
Glanza said:
Slightly on the expensive side but if it's data you require back can you put a cost on it?
Click to expand...

This is the critical question. I've been involved in a number of instances of data recovery. I'll just give two examples: firstly, a multi-million pound contract on a laptop where the HDD failed away from site. Overnight recovery, contract saved. Secondly, a corrupt RAID with results from flight trials data. Because of the nature of the data recovery would have to be on site or supervised, so the cost was going to be in the high four figures if not five. They opted to have everyone work over the weekend instead to recreate the results.
 
my data holds sentimental and personal value more than economical $ value. but I am happy that I got most of my music archive back and didn't loose any of my photos which would have been irreplaceable.
 
Always create a 1:1 image of the drive using dd or something similar before you attempt data recovery.
 
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