What data can I recover from my hard drive, after a system crash?

January 17, 2005 6:39 PM

HardDriveRecoveryFilter: wondering if there's anything I can do to recover data after a system crash other than formatting or a data recovery service. [...]

I've had a LaCie 250 gig USB Hard Drive (on a Pentium M laptop running XP) for a couple of months, and it's been working beautifully up until about an hour ago. I was saving some ID3 tags through Winamp, and the program crashed. So I closed out of the program, and when I tried to access the files on the drive, I got a series of "cyclical errors."

So I rebooted, and now the drive is allegedly "unformatted". Mechanically, it's fine, but it claims to have no information on it whatsoever.

My question is: aside from sending it out to a data recovery business (which I can't really afford; also, the value in what I lost is measured in time more than money, but there's a lot of time invested), is there anything -- free/shareware, system commands, I don't know what else -- I can do to maybe recover some or all of this data before I reformat it and start again?

posted by chicobangs to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Knoppix Live CD has saved many an endangered megabyte. Boot off of that and see if you can transfer files from the crippled drive to somewhere safer.
posted by m0nm0n at 7:18 PM on January 17, 2005

I'd give Spinrite a whirl. It's done wonders for dead drives before.
posted by Caviar at 7:50 PM on January 17, 2005

I can certainly vouch for Knoppix. I have saved more than a few clients drives this way, when they were staring down $2k+ quotes to bring it back. When that happens, they usually tip.
posted by Dean Keaton at 9:08 PM on January 17, 2005

As a last resort, I've heard lots of people suggest putting the drive in a ziplock bag and then in a freezer overnight, though googling suggests that evidence of success is largely anecdotal and that this is a somewhat dubious method.
posted by bobo123 at 11:22 PM on January 17, 2005

Absolutely use Linux, or some flavour of it. The best results, particularly with NTFS, revolve around a Linux box and a talented operator.
posted by krisjohn at 12:02 AM on January 18, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks to everyone for the hints. Knoppix didn't burn properly, but I'm using R-Studio FAT, and it's making some hay out of the drive, which really got mangled somehow. (I mean, I was just saving something to a file, fergodsake.)

I also got an email tonight pointing to this article, which has tons of anecdotal evidence, some of which is self-contradictory or downright dangerous. I didn't need any of it, but it's there, and

I wouldn't call the problem fixed, but I'm okay with going to sleep for a couple of hours while this thing continues to crawl the drive looking for the dead to be dragged out.

Any other hints or pointers you might have would be most welcome. I suspect I'm not done with this.
posted by chicobangs at 12:42 AM on January 18, 2005