Saving Private Data

April 7, 2008 12:54 PM

Why can I see the file structure of an external Hard Drive, but not be able to read or copy any of the actual files? A friend of mine's computer crashed on him recently. He was able to boot up, but when the system tried to start Windows, he got a message saying that a certain necessary file was missing. He gave me the Hard Drive in an attempt to pull his important files off of it so he could reformat the drive and start anew. It is an SATA 3.5" drive for a desktop computer. I have attached it to my Windows XP SP2 laptop via a USB 2.0 to SATA cable. My computer recognizes the two partitions on the drive and mounts them accordingly. I can see the files on the drive. However, when I try to read or copy a file from the drive, I get a "Cannot Find the Specified File." error. What do I do?
posted by soy_renfield to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Sorry about the extended post on the front page. My fault...
posted by soy_renfield at 12:55 PM on April 7

Sounds like possibly a corrupt FAT or corrupt bootsector?? Have you tried running CHKDSK on the drive first ?
posted by jmnugent at 12:59 PM on April 7

Yes.

The first thing you want to do is run a chkdsk.

(I prefer chkdsk /f /r - but those flags might be redundant)

Then, after it finishes, you want to download robocopy and get that shit off.
posted by kbanas at 1:07 PM on April 7

The error doesn't seem quite right, but one issue you'll run into when you take an NTFS drive from one system and hook it to the other is that you'll need to take ownership of all the files, and then set permissions so you can read them.
posted by Good Brain at 1:33 PM on April 7

When all else fails, I've had a lot of success using an oddly-named application called Stellar Phoenix to recover files from Windows disks where the filesystem is badly damaged. Unfortunately it isn't free (or indeed cheap).
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 1:39 PM on April 7

Don't run chkdsk or anything that writes to the disk!

I would recommend running PhotoRec against the drive. It's free and does an excellent job at recovering most common file types.
posted by samj at 3:04 PM on April 7

Free is xcacls.exe from microsoft.
It's a command-line program that can manipulate NTFS file permissions (which it calls Access Control Lists)
posted by hexatron at 4:58 PM on April 7

Testdisk-6.3.win.zip
Go to www.download.com and get this FREE program !
Will repair your FAT when disk crashes.
spent hours on other attempts. Put it on a thumb drive and you'll be glad
when the fan gets hit !
Recovered my FAT. Was truly amazed at the results.
posted by Agamenticus at 5:12 PM on April 7

If I were in your position, I would just boot up an Ubuntu live CD and use that to copy off the files you need. Current versions of Ubuntu have full NTFS read/write support, but do not respect NTFS file permissions. Unless your friend's hard drive contained encrypted files, this method should Just Work.

If you're fairly sure there's nothing actually wrong with the file structure on your friend's disk, and that NTFS file permissions are indeed the issue (which seems fairly likely to me), and you don't want to go the Linux route, read this thread first.
posted by flabdablet at 5:21 PM on April 7

nth iteration of the free-ntfs-and-fat-utility-that-saved-me-once answer: Pc Inspector
posted by bhance at 6:39 PM on April 7