Recovering data from an unallocated drive

Fuzz

Fuzz

Fuzz

Soldato
Joined
3 Aug 2003
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Got home from holiday and my neighbour is having a few issues with his PC in that it fails to boot.
Looks like after a few checks the HDD is at fault.
So I've taken it out and put it in a USB caddy and tried to access it.
I managed to initialize the disk but it is still classed as "unallocated"
Having done a little searching through threads on here "recuva" software was recommended, however it requires a drive letter to be input to recover from.

Any suggestions. :confused:


Will now try to connect direct with IDE cable to see it that gets me anywhere...
 
Done a create New simple volume, assigned it a drive letter and told it not to format the drive.
However the drive is still inaccessible and does not contain a recognised a file system" :?

Keeps asking me to format the drive. :o
 
Dont format it, that's a bad road to go down.

There's a program called testdisk which will recover (and restore) the partition table that was on the drive before. If this succeeds, all is well.

If the head has crashed, you need to image the drive immediately, then take a copy of the image, format it to whatever it was before and run data recovery software on it. If you run software on the drive directly you are likely to do more damage.

Best approach is to hand it back and say 'its knackered', but the above will yield results if you have a fair bit of time on your hands.

Good luck
 
It's back in the main PC now and I've ran the Recovery console..
CHKDSK tells me
"the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems"

FIXBOOT tells me
"Cannot find the system drive or the drive specified is not valid"

I am now hovering over the FIXMBR "Yes" command..
Is it worth hitting yes here or is that likely to be one of those roads you don't want to go down.

I realise "format" would be a really bad idea at the current time. :D

Off in search of "testdisk" now..
 
un packed zip of testdisk but cant workout how to make a boot disk for it to check the drive in the Main PC.
Owner fed up now and taking drive to the purple shirt brigade on Monday :/
 
NOOOO!!! You shouldn't have created a new simple volume. If you use paragon hard disk manager (30 day trial) It lets you undelete partitions. You might not be able to now since you've already created a new one. I've tested it several times by deleting partions in windows on purpose. It scans and tells you what partitions are available for you to undelete.

It also majorly saved my butt once. I accidentally formatted an hdd with a windows installation and important pics, etc...Scanned it and it took about 10 secs after scanning to restore the entire thing. Its pretty advanced software but a major lifesaver
 
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