Unformat, How to Recover From a Dead HD
Wow!! What a nightmare adventure this has been!! For background see posts; My PC Trouble Gets Worse Motherboard on the Fritz & Dead HD, What to do? And what to do next time?
System crash, dead hard drives, both my main drive and my backup drive, inspection from a tech resulted in referral to full blow dissection and internal repair of my drives at from $350-800/drive!! Then I found an open source program that recovered much of my data, but renamed it all and created a mess of 84 thousand files for me to figure out…..Finally I found a solution and it actually works! Why the computer tech didn’t know is beyond me. I found a simple, low cost effective program that will recover lost data from a completely inaccessible drive and it can even fix the drive so that you can access it again! Compared to $350-800 and/or the loss of my irreplaceable files, the cost of this solution to get my files back is a steal. The software is developed by DataRecovery and the specific program that I found effective at getting my data back is called iUndelete. The link will take you to a free trial download. This was the one that saved me. I have successfully run this software on two drives, a 160 gig and a 300 gig. I have salvaged/restored ALL my photos, music and document! ALL! And the computer tech couldn’t do it. Sure glad I didn’t send the drives away to be taken apart @ $500+/drive.
I think the biggest lesson I learned with this experience is, ALWAYS keep a backup of your files and system setting. I use a software program to assist me in this, Acronis True Image Backup Utility. Basically I have it set up to run in two ways, one it backs up all of my files to a secondary harddrive, two it backs up my system settings and programs. I also have the software installed within a small partition on my harddrive that it created so that if my system crashes, I can bypass windows at start up and run Acronis True Image. From there I can backup the system to the previous settings that I had.
Its interesting. After I managed to salvage my data, I decided to try and format the drive. So I downloaded a free partition manager, Cute Partition Manager. This little piece of software is really Cool. It is open source, so free, no strings attached, just download, create your boot disk and partition.
http://www.cutepm.com/
I ran this on a brand new HD to test it out. It worked like a charm, I could even create the partition as FAT32.
So I ran it on the dead drive, found the partition, deleted it, recreated a new one, same size and then rebooted the system. I easily formated the new partition and have now salvaged a dead HD, that the tech said was Hooped!
Pretty cool hey!
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
It was a really frustrating experience trying to figure this problem out. I spent hours and hours looking for answers and either running into dead ends or finding information too technical for me to understand. But perseverance paid off, I saved ALL my data!
Cheers!
Jeromy