hard drive recovery tools?

**EchiDna** · 28th June 2008, 07:46 PM

Hi guys, well my very nice WD raptor decided during the week that windows vista wasn't going to boot up... so I went through 10 or so rotations of the vista recovery suite on the dvd and it just didn't fix itself. reinstalled vista on another drive and now the PC can see the old raptor drive, but claims it is unformatted (which of course we know is not the case)... and wants to format before use... @#$G&^*F$V$ !!!

I've tried the Western Digital hard drive error checker and it find no faults with the drive! but of course there are a month or two of photos on there and contacts etc I'd like to get back if I can...

any software (preferably free) that anyone can recommend that will let me at least view the drive contents? I did have exactly such a program that ran in dos on the raptor *sigh* after a failed Raid rebuild a year or two back, but can't recall what it is!

thanks in advance!

**kaa45** · 28th June 2008, 07:56 PM

Haven't had to do it on Vista...YET.
I use pci_filerecovery.
Try Download.com, lots to chose from
Cheers
Danny

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 1st July 2008, 08:33 AM

search on HIRENS BOOT CD

good luck!!

**EchiDna** · 1st July 2008, 10:39 AM

Thanks for the pointers fellas

Unfortunately no luck thus far... I've got the machine functional again with a spare 7200 rpm hard drive, but still yet to try much more than the standard western digital hard drive tools (no errors) and also tried an MBR repair through the windows recovery console (vista style). I'm certain this is related to a vista update that occured as I shut it down the previous evening before the 'failure to read' - maybe a virus trigger? I dunno... will have a go at hiren's boot CD and report back

**JDNSW** · 1st July 2008, 11:26 AM

Try booting with a different O/S such as Knoppix from a CD/DVD and see if that will read it.

John

**ScrubPleb** · 1st July 2008, 11:29 AM

I've used SpinRite four times and it worked each time. One recovery session took 30 min,while another hard drive took 2 days. It's not free but it works.
GRC*|*Gibson Research Corporation Home Page**

**harlie** · 1st July 2008, 11:59 AM

Using a different OS such as Knoppix may work but if the problem is in the underlaying NTFS tables, any OS still won’t read it. The disk will need to be read bit by bit by something like spinRite. I’ve not heard of a good free product.

**EchiDna** · 1st July 2008, 12:30 PM

maybe I'm misleading you guys a bit...

the drive is seen by the bios, seen by the vista recovery console and "repairs" by the vista console for hours at a time with various self reboots, then eventually tells me the drive can't be read and needs to be formatted prior to use... this has taken from 10 minutes to 8 hours to process each time. Given that it is a small drive by current standards (72gb) and 10,000 rpm I would not expect it to take 2 days to diagnose a problem

**disco2hse** · 1st July 2008, 01:32 PM

Sounds to me like you have some bad sectors on the disk of the ntfs tables are shot.

If there is anything you really need from your disk I would suggest, if you are able to mount it at all, is to use the Vista utilities to back up your personal data to another drive then attempt to do a low level reformat. After that you will have to reinstall your system.

**dcc49** · 11th July 2008, 03:54 PM

The Boot CD located here The Boot CD ~ Recover Windows - they say will solve your problem for $20 US, 175MB download.

Alternative is to try Bart PE (free download - Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD) It will involve a bit of messing around, you will need to load XP onto a spare HDD to create the bootable CD. Once you have done that put the offending Vista drive in the PC boot with the Bart PE CD and with any luck you should be able to get to the files. I have not tried it with a Vista HDD so I don't know if it will work.

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