Recovering data from a suspect HDD

mattyfez

mattyfez

mattyfez

Soldato
Joined
12 Apr 2007
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Hi all,

Stupid question but im a bit rusty, friend has a PC with ether a borked windows install, or a failing HDD.

Going to start fresh with it, but data recovery, can I jst plonk the suspect drive into a caddy and then into another PC to recover personal data, pics etc, or is it more complicated with it being a win/boot drive?
 
Providing the drive isn't encrypted you can boot the machine with a Linux live CD and transfer the files to a usb stick or external hard drive depending on how much there is to save.

What's wrong with the machine? Will it not boot? If you have a Windows CD handy run chkdsk.
 
Hi, thanks, it wont boot, gets to windows logo loading screen and BSOD.

I have run CHKDSK /r which I ran from a windows xp disk and it didnt do any good, seemed to run the chkdsk way too quick and then just returned me to a command prompt.

I think either the OS is beyond economical repair or the HDD is fubar?
 
Is it suposed to reboot to run CHKDSK from CD? I just got a summary (no reboot) saying drive checked blah blah, and there was no errors reported, but it didnt say 'no errors found' either.

It did seem to run and complete the check suspiciously quick.

Cheers.
 
Have you got a caddy? Stick it in there and see if it will mount. If you don't have a caddy download a Linux cd (Ubuntu, Mint, doesn't really matter) and boot from the disc. Providing the hard disk isn't completely dead you should be able to see and traverse the file system. If you can do this then it's just a case of copying the files over to some other storage device.
 
Coolio, yeh I have an IDE-usb caddy, so I can just plonk it into the caddy and copy away, assuming the drive isnt toast?

The PC is a pentium4 so im pretty sure the HDD will be IDE.

Its just a standard XP home installation on the drive, IIRC, I think it has a recovery image on a seperate partition... but getting the personal data files is the priority...

Might be handy to utilise the recovery partition if its viable, save messing about reloading drivers etc. but 1st things 1st, will I just be able to browse the drive to pull photos off?

Cheers dude
 
mattyfez said:
so I can just plonk it into the caddy and copy away, assuming the drive isnt toast?


Might be handy to utilise the recovery partition if its viable, save messing about reloading drivers etc. but 1st things 1st, will I just be able to browse the drive to pull photos off?
Click to expand...
Yes, you can do that and preferably you try anything else - the fact that it's a Windows system drive won't make any difference. In fact, until you've recovered the data (or at least made a decent attempt), it's probably best to try and avoid powering the drive up at all except for that purpose.
 
What's the stopcode on the BSOD? Might be something else causing it to fail.

I once had a USB mouse cause this behaviour...took me ages to work out what was causing it to BSOD all the time :D
 
Cheers peeps :)

I have only managed to capture a 1 BSOD (athe time all boot devices were disabled apart from the XP cd disk)

stop code is:
0x000000ED 0x89881BAO 0xC000006 0x00000000 ox00000000

:(
 
If you want to download and burn a copy of the Knoppix linux CD, dead handy for this sort of thing and completely free. Alternatively get your USB drive booting with BartPE - it can be a tad messy though :) With Knoppix just make sure any USB drives are plugged in prior to turning the PC on so it detects them.
 
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