Can i recover files off a broken hard drive??

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jbard

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#439891 15-Feb-2011 16:35

richms: Well, now your friend will tell all his friends and hopefully people start to treat their data with respect.

I already have him on a strict backup plan - whether he sticks to it or not is another thing!

Lias

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#441207 18-Feb-2011 14:37

jbard:
richms: Well, now your friend will tell all his friends and hopefully people start to treat their data with respect.

I already have him on a strict backup plan - whether he sticks to it or not is another thing!

+1 for that..

Even IT pro's who know better forget sometimes, or get lazy. Hence my need for that recovery a few years ago :-)

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup.

trig42

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#441216 18-Feb-2011 14:51

We use DTI in Hamilton. Really good guys to talk to, and reasonably proced too.
You should send a working drive with the dead one so they can recover to that.

http://www.dtidata.co.nz

Lias

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#441219 18-Feb-2011 14:54

FWIW Datalab and DTIData are basically the same company (not sure how the relationship works, but they are.. Says "sister company" on the datalab site form memory.

richms

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#441220 18-Feb-2011 14:54

trig42: We use DTI in Hamilton. Really good guys to talk to, and reasonably proced too.
You should send a working drive with the dead one so they can recover to that.

http://www.dtidata.co.nz

No, send 2, and instruct them to keep one till you have reciept of the first.

Not worth risking a grand or more of recovery to a useless courier.

Richard rich.ms

cldlr76

289 posts

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#441250 18-Feb-2011 16:02

Have you tried putting the drive back in the laptop and use an ubuntu disk to boot it.

I've done that a couple of times to recover data from failing drives and got most of the data off. Guess it depends how bad the drive is

jbard

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#441252 18-Feb-2011 16:06

cldlr76: Have you tried putting the drive back in the laptop and use an ubuntu disk to boot it.

I've done that a couple of times to recover data from failing drives and got most of the data off. Guess it depends how bad the drive is

Yes this was the first thing i tried - had trouble at first getting linux to load as it was an old laptop and linux and ubuntu didn't support the graphics card.

Got puppy linux to work in the end but couldn't get it to even see the windows drive let alone mount it.

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bagpussnz

35 posts

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#441272 18-Feb-2011 16:55

Hi,
I have just been through this process with a colleague.

Attach the bad disk and a good disk of greater than or equal capacity to a computer (either internally, or by USB or eSata - depending on the machine).
Boot the machine using a Linux boot cd (this was ubuntu in our case)

Run command,

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=noerror,sync

The sda and sdb may be different. Remember disks start at "a" and go up from there.
(Make sure you get them round the right way. The if is for "input file" and of is for "output file").

This will copy as much as it can in raw format from one disk to the other - ignoring any error.

When finished (it will take a long time!!!!) - add it as an external disk to a windows machine - and see if you can get files off. Note: it may take windows a while to open the disk as it may try to index it.

(Actually we got what we wanted by mounting the copied disk onto a linux box and copying the files - we got everything needed).

Regards,
Ian

Lias

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#441286 18-Feb-2011 18:15

If your friend doesnt want to pay for dat recoveyr then consider the above post. If he does, dont try things like that before hand.

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