HD recovery - Help.

[uberlad]

Yesterday my brother got his shiny new 20Gb HD (only 48 quid with a voucher 8-) ) and began the process of bringing it into his system.

He copied all his vital files to the fdisk'd and formatted new drive and then blitzed his faster C: drive and reinstalled windows.

Being in a hurry, when the windows install run of scandisk said some stuff about D: drive, he skipped thru it quickly and didn't do any recovery stuff.

When Windows was finished installing he tried to get the data from D:, onyl to be told that whilst the machine could see the FAT, it was invalid and the data could not be displyed.

He's pretty gutted about this, as there's all his college work from the last 12 months, as well as all his emails in this drive.

Norton Disc doctor was no help, well the 2000 version anyway. Anyone got any suggestions of software that might be able to fix the drive or just pull the data off?

Thanks guys,

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[uberlad]

Splendid, any demos online or anything?

Or is he just going to have to bite the bullet and buy one?

ta,

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[isochar]

both offer limited versions which will tell you if they can recover anything, as well as let you recover up to 5 files (i believe)

I remember seeing the Easy Recovery software going for about $200 USD, so Lost & Found ($60) might be the way to go.

[uberlad]

Thnaks muchly for that, altough I think 200 dollars will be too rich for his blood (I expect even sixty might be problematic).

Ah well, I'll pass on the word and see if the evaluation versions can do the business. No doubt he could find an 'extended evaluation' copy somewhere should he require it. ;-)

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[HedsSpaz]

If you can find it, Drive Wizard is a great program. I don't remember who it was that made it, and I think they got bought by Symantec anyway. I also don't think that the program was ever updated to support Fat32. So, um, yeah... nevermind...

[Jorden]

uberlad, what kind of drive is that damaged drive, I mean, make and brand? A lot of the drive mfs have their own recovery programs on their sites, in case of a thing like this.

And what is the complete message that WIndows displays when you try to get onto drive D?
You might want to check with FDisk and see if the drive's not been set Active for some reason.

Jord.

[uberlad]

It's a quantum fireball, not 100% on the model number (as the brother is quite distant).

This also applies for the full error. If the disc recovery programs don't do the trick I'll get some more complete specs of the problem and open it up to the floor again.

thanks for the suggestion, started some gears grinding in my head 8-)

Uberlad


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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[Jorden]

Looked around for ya, uberlad. Check out the files on Quantum's site

I think you can start with d/ling the QDPS program.

[isochar]

Two programs come to mind:

Lost & Found
Ontrack Easy Recovery (Tiramisu)

both of them can recover files from a damaged drive...

[arbymo]

Jorden, you B#^*%^* !!
i was just going to post the same.
in fact i have the qdps program myself, it's just a diagnostic tool, it might tell you what's wrong, but it won't recover anything for you, unlike seagate who also have some recovery tools.
Anyway, uberlad if you have a version of norton utilities, you might give it a try as well, also look at your email
Edit:
also forgot to mention that they have uttilities to check the udma transfer rate, u might check that as well if the hard disk udma isn't set the same as the motherboard !



[This message has been edited by arbymo (edited 02 November 2000).]

[uberlad]

WE have complete data recovery.

Thanks for the help guys. My brother owes you one 8-)

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[uberlad]

Jorden has pointed out that it might be nice to explain how it got fixed. So I shall.

I found him a link to a copy of Lost and Found and that cleared it right up.

I thinik that the problem was that he just whacked it in the machine and formatted it without first fdisk-ing.

The crazy pre-formatting that the factory did accepted the format, but then windows didn't recognise it as a valid drive when it came to look at the drive durign its install and thus rebuilt the FAT in its own image.

That's what I reckon anyway.

All's well that ends well though, and now he's been instructed in the correct way to do it and everythgin is hunky dory.

Thanks all that offered assistance.

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[Greebe]