External Hard Drive Problem

[Hashjie]

Hello everyone,

Today a friend of mine called me telling that his external hard drive doesn't work.
It contains a lot of movies which he would like to recover.
The problem is: for some reason the file system changed from NTFS to RAW.
So I used testdisk in order to recover the partition structure.
Unfortunately this did not seem to work.

So I tryed accessing the drive through DOS, which showed me that there is a data error (cyclic redundancy).
Opening the drive in my computer tells me I need to format the drive (which I'm not going to since I want to restore the files on the hard drive)
Does anyone have an idea what I could do in order to get the lost data back?

 

[Kercyn]

I found these 2 links:
1
2

 

[Hashjie]

I found these 2 links:
1
2

EASEUS is a unregistered program which will recover not more then 1 gb.
You'll need to pay to recover more.... (I can google too you know ^.^)

Getdataback is a payed application which gets the data back of broken NTFS and FAT32 file system drives, mine changed to RAW...

I've already tryed repairing the partition table to no avail

I'm not yet sure about SpinRite, I'll check that out...

EDIT: 1 little thing: When I analyzed the drive with testdisk, my drive started making the ticking noice of death sound
Luckily after recovering the partition structure (which did not seem to help at that time when recovering files) it stopped making the ticking sound.
I was getting ready for a completely crashed down drive, but now I still have a chance of recovering the files.
Please if there is anyone with good knowledge on this, do share it. I am in deep need of help here

 

[Kercyn]

Looks like I didn't read them well enough :S
Another solution I've found suggests writing "D:\> CONVERT D: /fs:ntfs" to your command prompt, with D: being the letter of the drive. If that doesn't work, the poster says to "use a '98 machine". Maybe Win98 can read RAW data?
Also, this.

 

[Hashjie]

Looks like I didn't read them well enough :S
Another solution I've found suggests writing "D:\> CONVERT D: /fs:ntfs" to your command prompt, with D: being the letter of the drive. If that doesn't work, the poster says to "use a '98 machine". Maybe Win98 can read RAW data?
Also, this.

I'm scared of converting it back to NTFS, will this make the data remain the same? Since it sounds like it's formatting over the actual RAW file system and then turn it into NTFS :S

And yes win98 can read RAW data (tested this half a year ago on a friends comp running win98).
That is why I need to use DOS programs in order to recover the files from RAW file system drives (they can't be read in windows 7 or vista)

Oddly enough when I list the files on the partition of the hard drive it says that there is only 1 autorun.inf file and 2 inaccessible folders. I extracted it from the hd and it contains the following lines:

[autorun]
icon=.VolumeIcon.ico

Not sure if this will help, but someone with greater knowledge on this would be appreciated.
I'm still analyzing the cylinder as we speak, to see if any deeper partitions can be found. (That might explain why I got the cyclic redundancy data error?)

80/121601 00% complete -,-
Also:
Read error at 40/40/1 (lba=645120)
Does that mean that a sector on the HD became corrupt causing the entire HD to become inaccessible?

 

[Kercyn]

I'm afraid you'll have to wait DSG for a more detailed explanation, but maybe it's a hardware fault?

Does that mean that a sector on the HD became corrupt causing the entire HD to become inaccessible?

...and there's a good chance that that's the case.

 

[Hashjie]

I'm afraid you'll have to wait DSG for a more detailed explanation, but maybe it's a hardware fault?

...and there's a good chance that that's the case.

Yeah I expect worst case scenario
Ow well, at least the drive can still be formatted. A shame of all his video's though...
I still have a screenshot waiting at home, I'll post it when I get there.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Inorder to recover such data is increadibly specalist work (you need to understand how the data is stored on the disk and how the files you want to recover are structured) and probably nolonger possible due to how much data can be stored (could take man years).

I advise in future considering using backups incase a drive failure occurs. RAID1 and above could be used to add some fault tollerence.

 

[Hashjie]

Would replacing the circuit board make any difference?
I guess not but still, it's worth to give a shot right?

I know it is specialized work.
But it's way and way to expensive to let professionals do it in a lab.
This can easilly cost from $400 to $4000.
I'd rather try it myself.

Either ways, I think I'll just tell my friend to format the drive and tell him that his files are probably lost and the only way of getting them back is to pay a way to high amount of money.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Would replacing the circuit board make any difference?

Only if it was a fault there which is quite unlikely as most faults are to do with the actual mechanics in them (moving parts are far less reliable than electronic circuits).

 

[Hashjie]

I guess you're refferencing to the actuator and platter.
Hence the ticking sound.
However that problem seemed to be solved by repairing the structure of the partition.

Either ways, I'll leave it as it is and fragmentate the drive.
A shame of the files but it is better then having no drive at all.
My friend didn't want to pay for file recovery since he still has the files on his computer apparantly.
He just told me that today, I could've just done that in the first place >.>
Ow well...

Thanks for the great help DSG and Kercyn