Problems with External
Hard Drives & Data Recovery
How Valuable is Your Data?
Time for a personal assessment! If your life would be ended if you can't get your data back, go immediately to "Data Recovery Professionals" below - do not be tempted to stop and read anything else en route!
If your life would not actually end, but you'd be huge amounts of money out of pocket if you could not get your data back, or would lose your job, or your business would close down - again - go to Data Recovery Professionals.
But if losing your data would simply make you very sad - maybe it's lots of irreplaceable family photos, or your own personal recordings of your band, or something like that - but you don't think you can afford to employ someone to recover the data, and you're prepared to spend time - sometimes lots of time - and effort - very often huge amounts of effort - trying to recover your data - read on.
Whatever you do - DO NOT:
do not do anything which overwrites the data on the damaged drive! Do not write anything to the damaged drive, do not let it be partitioned or formatted by any operating system, do not install file recovery programmes on to the disk - any data you, deliberately or accidentally, write to the drive might overwrite the files you have there, making them impossible to recover.
Data Recovery Professionals
I've never used them - never needed to as, so far, I've always been able to recover data - either my own, or on other people's disk drives - by various techniques. But I have found that no one technique is guaranteed and, the more different techniques you have to try, the greater the possibility of losing all the data permanently. There are occasions where a complete loss of data is simply is not an acceptable option. If that's the case, go get a Data Recovery Professional! Google to find them -but bear in mind it's likely to be costly (that said, as I've never used them, I've no idea what the costs might be – could be better- or much worse - than you might think!). I've heard they very rarely fail to recover data from drives, even ones which are totally knackered - but I've also heard that many times there's nowt wrong with the drives which are sent to them -just that the drives have been wrongly installed or there's a simple remedy which hasn't been tried before parcelling them off to the recovery folk. So, go DIRECTLY to the experts if your data is priceless, but if it's less so, check out the other approaches suggested below.
Installing the disk drive in a PC.
The following steps require you to open your external drive enclosure (which will invalidate your warranty!), to remove the internal hard disk drive and to install it in your PC (which, aside from putting your data at risk, runs the further risk that you might knacker your main PC also! Unlikely, but you need to be aware of the risks)! See this page for details of how to remove the disk drive and install it in your PC.
File Recovery Utilities
In some circumstances, a File Recovery programme can do the necessary. Certainly, they're worth trying if you've deleted files, or accidentally repartitioned or reformatted the drive, but obviously they're no use if you can't actually see the drive from your operating system. Google on the Internet and you'll find downloadable file recovery programmes. Most are relatively inexpensive (maybe £20-£30). I generally use Active@FileRecovery but there's lots of others which I'm sure are as good, possibly better. If you want to try a free one, go to http://officerecovery.com where you can download FreeUndelete, which is entirely free and, although very basic, seems to work (although I have not yet subjected it to any challenging tests) - but do give it time to work! The large drives found in external drives today take a long time - often hours - to analyse - be patient!. Another, more sophisticated, programme is PC Inspector File Recovery (www.convar.com) which I've also successfully used, although not in earnest - I've just tried it out a few times, out of interest. If you find your operating system can't see the drive, but your BIOS can, don't despair. If you spend enough time rummaging around the Internet, you will find various programmes which will run from a floppy disk at startup and which can access drives which cannot be found by an operating system. As I say, don't give up - there will be a way to reover your data, unless you are very very unlucky! But, there's no guarantee these programmes will be able to recover your data - you might be lucky or you might not - it's just trial and error.
How to use File Recovery Utilities
If you are very lucky, you might be dealing with a situation where your external drive, while faulty, can still be seen by your operating system, but you can't read the contents of the disk drive. In that situation, load the File Recovery programme on to your PC, and get it to search on your external drive - you might be very lucky and find you can recover all your data that way. The programme will perform a scan routine - that could take very many hours to complete if your external drive is high-capacity - be patient and let the programme finish it's work. When the scan is complete, it should indicate the files it can recover, allowing you to copy these to your PC's hard drive. DO NOT try to copy the files to your external drive - you run the risk of overwriting the files you have there! Once you have copied all the files you need to your hard drive, you should be able to repartition and reformat the drive, to get it back fully working.
More probably, you'll find that your operating system cannot see the external drive at all, or the external drive will be acting as if it were completely dead. In that situation, there's nothing for it but to dismantle the external drive, remove the hard disk drive inside and install it in a PC, then run the File Recovery programme on that PC. You'll find guidance on how to remove the disk drive and install it in a PC here. but remember that doing so will invalidate your warranty! Once you have installed the disk drive DO NOT let the operating system partition or format the disk drive - thay may make your files even more difficult to recover. Install the File Recovery programme on your PC's main disk drive and run it from there. If you manage to find files to recover, DO NOT copy them to the external drive you just installed - copy them to another drive - ideally the PCs main drive. Once you have recovered the files you need, you can then partition and format the drive, then re-install it in your external drive enclosure and - hopefully - all should now be working.
Linux Live CDs
There's an alternative to File Recovery programmes, which often works very well - sometimes better than the file recovery programmes themselves. You've almost certainly at least heard of Linux? It's an alternative operating system - every bit as good as Windows.- some would say much better than Windows in lots of ways! The big advantage of the "Live CD" versions of Linux which are currently available for free download on the web, is that they can be run on almost any PC and will not write anything to your PCs hard drive while running. Instead of installing itself on to your PCs hard drive like a "normal" operating system, the "Live CD" versions are intended to run from CDs - they work by installing themsleves in to the temporary memory which your PC has - known as RAM. When you switch your PC off, and remove the Live CD, your computer will start as normal next time. So - you need have no concerns that you will knacker your main PC or that you will overwrite the data you are trying to recover on the external drive - Live CDs are entirely safe.
So - how do they help in recovering data? Well, without launching in to a hugely long technical explanation - Linux can "see" data on all sorts of hard disk drives - even damaged ones. It's particularly effective at recovering files on disk drives where the Windows file system has been damaged..
Go to www.distrowatch.com where you’ll find details of various versions - I currently recommend Knoppix 5 for any PC capable of running Windows XP or 2000, but there's loads to choose from - and you don't need to be a Linux expert to run them although you will need to puddle about for a bit until you master the art of copying files from your damaged drive to your PCs main drive. Linux can very often access files when Windows can't. But bear in mind my earlier warnings - even with a Linux Live CD you can - if you try hard enough - write data to the damaged drive, which you must avoid at all costs. Use the Live CD Linux version to "see" the files you want to recover, then copy them to your PCs main drive. Whatever you do, bear in mind my constant warning – DO NOT WRITE ANYTHING TO THE DRIVE – load the recovery programme on another drive and recover any files you find to that other drive also.
I doubt if there's an IT Department in the country - probably in the world - which does not have a Linux Live CD on hand to recover data on Windows (and other) systems in an emergency. It's one of these "trade secrets" which, once you've tried it, you'll be amazed why it's remained a "secret" for so long!.
That's basically it. If your external drive is knackered, and you are determined to save the data, there's an extremely good chance you will succeed in doing so - if you persevere! The one thing needed to succeed is utter determination! Take heart from the fact that the longest it took me to recover data from someone's drive was 14 months! During that 14 months I tried, in any spare moments I had, every possible file recovery programme, every Linx distro I could find, I ran the drive on obscure MS-DOS programmes - tried every hardware trick in the book - I refused to give up - and I got there eventually, stumbling on the solution, and recovering all the data that the customer was seeking - OK it took 14 months and it certainly would have been much much quicker if the customer could have afforded a proper Data Recovery professional! They couldn't and I was determined to get the data back.....so - be stubborn & don't give in - you'll get there eventually!.
Good luck.
Post a message at the Freecom Forum with “Techie” in the title if any of this has been useful to you. And if it hasn’t or if you’ve knackered your drive permanently or lost your priceless files…..well, read the disclaimer right at the start of this help sheet…….
The Techie from Sneckie