Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with datarecovery

recovering photos from a gnawed-upon SD card

scruss — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:41:19 -0800

Are there any services (preferably in Canada) that will attempt to get data from a damaged SD card? A friend has baby pictures on an SD card, which said baby later found and used as an inappropriate teething aid. The card doesn't show up on any computer/card reader, though most card readers do accept it.

I've tried RescuePro, PhotoRec and PhotoRescue, all on Mac. None of them even see the volume.

How do you fix a fried laptop?

Bobby Bittman — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:20:31 -0800

How badly have I fried my laptop? I went to a friend's house last night to watch a perfectly legally downloaded movie, and planned to hook my laptop up to his TV with an S-Video cable. Well, something wasn't grounded - when I touched the S-Video cable to the jack on his TV, there was a spark and my laptop shut off.

Now it's a brick. No power lights, no response at all.

I'm going to find all of this out on Monday when I take it in to the repair shop, but I'm anxious: how badly have I damaged it? Is this the kind of thing that can be repaired? How much does it cost? And most importantly - is all my data recoverable?

If it matters, it's a 4-year-old Gateway laptop. All educated guesses welcome. Thank you!

What are my options with a dead external drive?

neewom — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:05:00 -0800

Stupid computerfilter: I didn't back up, and now the external drive seems dead. Options? I have a 150GB acomdata external hard drive ... not sure how old it is, really, but it's lasted a hell of a lot longer than I think is reasonable to expect. I bought an iomega to replace it, but when I moved I lost the cables. Today, I found the cables, and was planning on doing a backup tomorrow.
Unfortunately, sod's law has struck and I have a dead drive. There is no discernible spinning when I try to boot the drive, my OS is not mounting the drive...
I've scoped out a few other AskMe's, came up with Data recovery on the cheap. The freezer trick is out, as I really do not want to ruin the drive before I've exhausted all other options. Gillware seems to be a fairly good, not-local option, are there other options I should consider?

Details:

I am pretty sure this is a mechanical failure, not a logical failure.
Professional data recovery services are expensive. I am currently unemployed and would prefer to avoid professional services, but willing, depending on a reasonable price.
The power supply seems fine, but I don't have another one to test with.
I'm using a dual-boot Windows XP / Ubuntu 9.04. I have tried mounting the drive in both systems and windows recognizes there's something there, but cannot start it.
When I boot the drive, there is no spin, no noises unless I put my ear to it. Putting my ear to it gives me a high-pitched click, then two identical, lower-pitched clicks ... spindle motor not running, I'm guessing.

So, I think I have two options:

Open the case and tinker. I would really, really rather that I didn't have to do this, but I'm happy to try if necessary.
Take it to a recovery service and hope they aren't going to charge a grand.

Querying the hive for next-to-last-ditch options and suggestions.
If I have to take it to a recovery service, can any of you recommend a reliable, cost-effective service in the Atlanta, GA area?

How do I figure out if I've lost all my data?

droomoord — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:19:43 -0800

Yesterday, my portable hard drive got knocked over while it was being read from and began making a vicious gurgle. My husband unplugged it before I could try to disconnect it. When I turned it back on, it's still sounds terrible. As I am currently not backed up, my brain is refusing to really approach this, and I'm drawing a total blank on what to do next. I'm very attached to this data.

My Maxtor drive (Seagate disk??) won't mount. Where should I send it?

skylar — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:05:20 -0800

My Maxtor Basics 1 terabyte external USB 2.0 drive no longer mounts. I have been through all the usual stuff with tech support (including disk management and device management) and I've tried it on multiple computers. Although the green light comes on when it's plugged into USB, apart from that it's not talking to the computer. There has been no strange noise, clicking, smoke or smell. Maxtor tech support say it's a failed drive. A data recovery company I phoned said it's probably damaged firmware but the data on the disk is probably safe. I'm nervous about sending it to a data recovery company because I seem to be looking at about GBP £179 minimum or maybe many, many hundreds more. Is it likely to be a matter of simply soldering something here or replacing something there, ie a job that I could take to a local geek? Or should I be looking to take this to a major data recovery centre? I'm in London, UK.

how can I get data off this drive?

dozo — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:05:36 -0800

I am trying to recover data from a WD3200ME-01, a WD 320GB USB-powered drive but the physical drive does not have SATA or IDE connection - only a mini USB connection soldered to the circuit board - and the drive is not recognized via USB anymore. Images of the extracted drive are here (I apologize for the medium quality of the photos). Normally we take the drive out, hook it to a machine on our bench and run data recovery software if the drive is capable. This is the first one of these I've found like this so far. The USB connection is part of the the circuit board itself, which extends well past the normal dimensions of a drive like this, and the SATA connectors are modified. It does NOT work like this, which is how I expected it to.

Has anyone been able to make this drive do SATA like it should (the drive label states that it is Serial ATA) or find another way to access these drives?

Data recovery on the cheap?

KevinSkomsvold — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:58:59 -0800

Anyone ever have any experience with Drive Fish? It's a data recovery company. I stumbled across them in my quest to revive a hard drive that crashed over the weekend. I've been quoted some pretty steep prices (high end was $2,195) and this one seems too cheap to be true.

Hard Drive wipeout

mike_bling — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:57:06 -0800

Hard drive recovery: my external USB hard drive is mounting fine on both my mac and PC, however, all the files are showing up as garbage characters. It's also reporting that the drive is 95% full, when it definitely wasn't anywhere near that. I've already used Data Rescue II to get copies a few of my most important files, I'm just wondering if there is anything more I should try before I format the drive and start over. It seems like the index was corrupted, but there is nothing physically wrong with the drive.

Accidentally deleted my life...

pablocake — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:47:25 -0800

All my calendar entries gone! Help! Any way to recover them from either my phone or iCal on my Mac? I tried syncing my phone with my new Mac using iSync. It worked fine. Copied all my contacts and calendar entries from the phone to the Mac. Great. But then being new to Macs I accidentally deleted the Home calendar.

No problem I thought, I'll just sync with my phone again. But then when I synced, it just deleted every calendar entry on my phone!

So my question is, can I either:
a) Recover deleted calendar entries from my phone (Nokia 5300); or
b) Recover a deleted calendar in iCal

Macfilter: accidental time machine format

amestoy — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:41:32 -0800

A friend plugged his Seagate usb external drive into a MacBook Pro and then somehow inadvertantly accepted a prompt to set the drive up for Time Machine backups without thinking. The drive hasn't been written to since then. Is there a way to get the original data back (there's no backup, of course)? Failing that, any recommendations for data recovery services in the UK?

But this WAS my backup!

N2O1138 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:02:37 -0800

How can I repair any broken files resulting from power loss during defragmentation? It seems that most file recovery applications want to move everything to a new disk, but this is not a good option for me because I don't have any other drives large enough. I was using iDefrag on my terabyte (My Book) external hard drive. It had gotten almost 21 hours in, and somehow the power cable got unplugged and the battery died. To make a long story short, iDefrag can't see the disk at all, Disk Utility sees the hard drive but not any of the data or the partition itself, and verify and repair are not selectable. So this is
Mac OS 10.5.6, Macbook Pro, My Book 1tb external hard drive, iDefrag.

Why would you defrag an HFS+ external hard drive, you ask? I'm about to set up Boot Camp, and I want some extra space for Windows-compatible storage, but it won't make an NTFS partition because the free space isn't consecutive.

I have a feeling that there isn't much to repair, and all the data (including backups of every computer in the house, including some long since reformatted, as well as my 30gb+ iTunes library that I just moved there) should still be there, I just don't know how to make anything see the hard drive in the first place.

I do have access to another My Book 1tb (this one is NTFS), but I don't know if it would have enough free space either (and it's my dad's)

Help me recover data from an old iBook HDD

saraswati — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:38:51 -0800

How can I recover data from an iBook (G4) HDD using my new Intel-based MacBook? A few years ago I had an iBook G4 that died of a logic board failure. The HDD, as far as I know, is still intact. I have a MacBook now and would really like to retrieve some things that I never backed up from that old drive. What's the easiest way for me to do this myself? Are there any external enclosures I could use that would just work with an iBook drive right out of the box? Thanks!

"Sorry I lost all of your data..."

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:11:42 -0800

I was working on someone's laptop and all of their data has been overwritten. How do I break it to them gently? They had a funky video problem; initially it seemed that reinstalling the OS would be necessary, and the owner balked at the idea of having to backup / restore data and reinstall apps (which I'd certainly do, for a fee).

The video problem began appearing in safe mode and BIOS, so I was able to get the motherboard replaced using depot repair. I explained that I'd be able to remove "the" hard drive before sending it in, so he wouldn't lose anything.

In my rush to get it sent in quickly at the end of a long day, I removed "the" hard drive but as it turns out, this laptop had two drives and the one I removed was blank, and in no danger...

So yeah, they replaced the motherboard, and wiped / reimaged the primary drive (which really wasn't necessary, !$#*!# but I expected as much).

I consider myself pretty competent and just did a shoddy job here. It sucks big-time; I am very contrite but need to broach the subject gently. I'm thinking I'll ask "so, did you know that your laptop has two hard driveS?" because I'm pretty sure he doesn't. Would've been nice to tell me when I said "I'll remove *the* hard drive for you" but I know it really wasn't hard to miss and I just wasn't thinking about it.

I know he has an external drive but I suspect he hasn't been backing up.

Typically, the geek answer is "you're responsible for your data above all else, and should've backed it up before the laptop left your hands." The video problem didn't make the laptop 100% unusable, so he could've done this (and he was familiar with Safe Mode, and had been using it just fine).

However, I consider myself trustworthy and competent, and imagine myself to be "that person" you entrust your laptop with, knowing they'll carefully back everything up twice before wiping anything out, and maybe even keep your 30GB worth of personal data for awhile (disclosed, of course) or burn it to DVD, saving your rear when you manage to blow it away.

This was a huge mistake, a learning experience for both parties, and I'm dreading the conversation.

I'm pretty sure the odds of recovery are about nonexistent: format, re-image, boom. I don't know how many "motions I should go through" to demonstrate this, whether I should be paying for software that has little to no chance of doing anything, or what sort of liability I should try to accept for causing the problem. I'm certainly not planning to charge for time spent troubleshooting and coordinating the repair.

Looking For A Data Recovery Company

Brian Puccio — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:47:02 -0800

Please recommend a data recovery/harddrive recovery firm, familiarity with HFS+ filesystems a plus. I've got a dead harddrive that spins up and shows one partition, but I cannot repair it either under OS X or with a Linux live CD. I've tried a few software packages, but none of them get any data off the drive. (Though Data Rescue II does show a list of the file names, when I restored a file, it didn't open, so it can see the files, it's just returning corrupt data.) Before you all say "restore from your backups" this is my backup disk, specifically, my Time Machine backup harddrive.

I'm in the US and will ship pretty much anywhere and pay the considerable amount of money it will probably cost to recover the data (mostly images - CR2 files) from this drive.

Thanks!

DeadMacFilter: Will Target Disk mode screw up my healthy computer?

neroli — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:22:49 -0800

Dead hard disk on a G3 iMac. Seemingly healthy 2nd-hand G4 iMac. If I try to access data on the dead machine via target disk mode, is there a chance—any chance at all—that I could screw up the healthy machine? (Note: I’m a total computer illiterate. Or rather, I have been a total computer illiterate—I don’t want to be any more. So, apologies in advance for obvious dimness.)

My long-ailing ancient iMac finally bit the dust. Can only boot from the (OS 9) system disk; hard drive won’t mount. Ran Disk Repair: “MountCheck found serious errors.” Tried to repair many times: no go.

Now, this isn’t a terrible tragedy. I knew the old guy was on its last legs. I have back-ups of pretty much all my important files—on CDs and on my work computer. It isn’t worth it to me to pay for a data recovery service. I don’t even want to spend the money and the effort to get Disk Warrior. But there were some photos and documents on the G3 that I don’t have a copy of. Nothing essential, but it would be nice to have them back.

I hadn’t saved up enough to buy to the new machine I wanted, but I got a really good deal on a refurb G4 iMac (800 MHz, PowerPC, running Tiger), which I figured would keep me going for the time being. And actually, I like this computer a lot. I want to keep it healthy as long as possible.

So: I have a working computer, a dead computer, and a FireWire cable. Trying to mount the hard disk on the working machine with target disk mode looks relatively straightforward, even for someone like me. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll be able to get the files, but I’d like to try one more thing before I give up.

But before I do this, I want to be totally, absolutely sure that this won’t cause any unforeseen problems on the healthy machine. I know it’s no spring chicken itself. I have a 60-day hardware warranty and no system disk for the G4. I really, really don’t want to screw it up. (I don’t care what happens to the G3, and I’ve pretty much given up the data for lost, so no worries on that end.)

Can someone who knows something about all this either reassure me or warn me off? Many thanks.

Help me examine my FAT.

harkin banks — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:32:38 -0800

How can I figure out what file a particular FAT32 sector belongs to? I recently used ddrescue to recover data from an old 30 GB drive that had gone bad. ddrescue took about 24 hours to run, but when it finished I had a 99.99+% good copy, with only about 70 errors. The partition information is OK, so I can read the new drive with no problem. So far, so good.

Now I'd like to figure out which files the unreadable sectors belong to, so I know if any important files were compromised files. I have the ddrescue logfile, which lists the drive contents as blocks of readable/unreadable sectors. How can I use this output to figure out which files were not recovered completely?

I've seen this post on the ddrescue mailing list (linked to by flabdablet in a previous question about data recovery), but my drive is FAT32, and MSFT's nfi.exe doesn't work for non-NTFS drives. I found another post on the ddrescue mailing list by the same author, in which he links to a Perl program of his that looks up FAT32 filenames based on input from the ddrescue logfile. Exactly what I need, right? However, the program is listed as "under construction" in his post, and it doesn't work for me with sectors numbered above about 10,000,000. Unfortunately all but 8 or 9 of my unreadable sectors are above that threshold. I've banged my head against its 1500 lines of code for the last week or so trying to find the reason it fails and succeeded only in making my head hurt. (I emailed the author about it last weekend and have gotten no response.)

I did the initial ddrescue-ing on an ancient Pentium II running Debian Sarge, but I also have a more modern machine running Win XP. Any suggestions?

data recovery on iPhone?

Countess Elena — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:58:33 -0800

Can you save data from an iPhone, in any manner, once it has entered "recovery" mode and iTunes informs you that you need to restore the phone? I know that a more technical-minded person wouldn't have let this happen, and I promise I checked out the manual on this. I know I'm a goober for using iTunes; please do not chide me! Here's what happened.

1. I take a bunch of great pictures today, and plug in the iPhone to upload them.

2. It has been a few weeks since I last did so, and iTunes offers me a software upgrade. I say yes.

3. Big mistake.

4. iTunes could not finish installing the software because "an unknown error occurred." It seems as if the connection was physically interrupted, but I don't know how.

5. iTunes then informs me that the phone was in "recovery mode" and I couldn't use iTunes without either restoring or using something called "iBoot."

6. But my pictures! And I don't have iBoot. What the hell is iBoot? My iPhone will not respond.

7. As the computer does not appear to perceive that the iPhone is connected, and a disconnection sound was made, I remove it and turn the phone on and off a few times. Although responding to button commands, the iPhone will only return to a screen showing the cord and an iTunes logo.

8. I hate this piece of shit slow-ass Toshiba oh my God I hate it I hate it.

9. I try Google, and am confused by all the possibilities for the problem and the recovery.

10. I try this question.

Can I retrieve my pictures? Are the data recovery applications I find on Google reputable and useful in this situation? Thank you so much for your help.

scsi pci raid server died, urgent data recovery?

tslugmo — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:46:12 -0800

Got a 2000 server with PCI SCSI RAID card (Mirror) and the mobo seems to have died. I just want to recover the data and host it on another machine. How do I do that? I've installed the PCI card in another computer running XP, and in Disk Mgmt I saw "Import Foreign Disk" which I did, and now I see both volumes. Then I click on Reactivate Disk, but it does not change anything. The volume reads Failed (Active).

Any ideas? Super time-sensitive!

Getting Vista To See The Contents Of An Old W98 HD

scrump — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:28:16 -0800

How do I pull data from an old Windows 98 HD using Vista? I've got a Vista Pro machine to which I want to transfer files from an old Windows 98 machine. The key facts about the old machine are that it doesn't have a CD burner, nor does it have an ethernet port.

I can, however, pull the HD and connect it to the Vista machine. After doing so, I see the machine's native HD (360GB), and the old Fujitsu drive (as D:). However, all I see on the Fujitsu drive is a partition called RECOVERY. I can't cd to D:\, either.

I tried changing security settings, and Vista promptly showed me a dialog in which the names of plenty of files scrolled by: the content I want to recover is clearly /there/, but for some reason I can't "see" it in Vista.

Any thoughts on why this might be?

Why is my harddrive empty?

A! — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 07:12:22 -0800

My windows didn't want to boot up, so I bought a new hard disc installed Windows on it and made the old one slave. The old hard disc reads as completely empty. Why? The old disc has two partitions, and the second partition I can read and move files etc, but the main partition where windows was/is reads as empty, so I was wondering if anyone has an idea of why this could be? Of course any solution would be great, too! Thank you!

ipod amnesia

Doug — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 15:37:06 -0800

How do I recover music from an iPod that has suddenly reset itself? A friend lent me her iPod a few months ago. I never connected it to my computer, but I’d charged it and used it a few times. The other day I turned it on and it had mysteriously returned to the factory settings. No music on it at all. Unfortunately, my friend had several original, irreplaceable copies of songs she’d written on the iPod. I need to recover those songs!

Important to note: I have a pc, and do not currently have iTunes installed. Also, the computer my friend had the iPod synced with has since broken.

Clone a laptop drive

killdevil — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:05:31 -0800

What is the easiest way to make a bit-perfect copy of a potentially failing laptop hard drive? The copy target would be a new 2.5" drive that I'd then install in the same laptop. I'd like to clone my laptop hard drive onto a replacement drive. The copy target would be a new laptop drive. Whatever mechanism I use to copy data would ideally a) not be derailed by bit errors (the current drive IS failing, after all) and b) be able to enumerate which files are corrupt, if any.

I'm running Windows XP, but would be willing to boot into a Linux CD distribution, etc... I'm a pretty sophisticated user, just not an I.T. guy with copies of Ghost lying around (and don't recommend Norton Ghost, please; it's over-complicated and I hate it).

Accidentally repartitioned drive - can I recover files?

jbb7 — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 07:27:12 -0800

I was going to repartition an external USB hard drive in Mac OS X 10.4 in Disk Utility, and after I clicked Partition, I thought I clicked Cancel when I learned it would result in data loss. I guess I actually clicked OK, and then I quickly quit Disk Utility and disconnected the drive (it had already been unmounted). Now, when I reconnect the drive, it shows up as having been repartitioned, and all of the data on there is gone. Can I get my data back? It only had about 4 seconds of being connected before I cancelled and unplugged it. I am sure that all of the bits are still on there, but the partition table seems to have been nuked. Is it possible to recover the files without sending the disk to DriveSavers? (It's mostly backups, but there are some original photos not backed up anywhere else that I would really like to recover.)

All partitions are Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The disk is a 500 GB Western Digital external USB hard drive.

Gillware - good or bad?

matildaben — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:42:06 -0800

Does anyone have experiences with Gillware for recovering data from a dead hard drive, aside from user bhance? They are cheaper than the big enterprise-level data recovery companies, but I'd like to see comments from more than one person if possible.

Rescuing Word Files with Knoppix

Danf — Mon, 07 May 2007 11:48:57 -0800

How do I get Knoppix to read .doc files? Through a rather steep and lengthy learning curve, I have booted up my ailing XP laptop with a Knoppix CD. It sees the MSWord files of my wife's writing, but does not recognize them as .doc files, and when I try either to drag or copy them to the floppy drive, I get a message: "could not determine file type, and none was specified."

Knoppix sees that there are some KB worth of data in those files.

What now?

(and I would be delighted to find out that this is a double, but I could not find anything either in AskMeFi or anywhere else on the web.