I know Stogie is like an expert at data recovery but I'm going to ask everyone as well. My friend just gave me his PC to keep but I'd like to getting all his personal files off before doing anything with it. The thing is his drive is fucked. When I turned on his PC it boot up and was booting into windows. It got past the black windows Xp logo screen with the "progress bar" underneath it and then before it made it to the welcome screen I got a BSOD that said Unmountable boot volume. I've never seen that before. So I bust open the PC and take the HD out and plug it into mine. He told me he had viruses on it so I boot into Vista x64 which is the most secure OS I got to try and troubleshoot this drive. While doing so after 5 min of a blank black screen my PC says disk E (the shitty disk) need to be check for consistency. So I let it run chkdsk and it starts popping up these errors I haven't seen before. I took a pic on my iPhone so you can see.



It kept doing the file record 65XX is unreadable thing for a while. Each file record took about a minute to say it was unreadable!! So after about file # 6525 I was sick of waiting and just restarted cause I don't care enough to wait 6 weeks for it to finish. Anyways after I did a force reboot it was taking forever to boot up cause of this shitty drive. So I became unpatient and unplugged it and decided to come here and ask what I should do. The hdd seemed to be making a few to many sounds than I'm used to from a HDD, IDK if that's just cause I was running chkdsk but i think something is wrong mechanically but it can still be read so it may be somewhat salvagable. So what programs can a try to save this thing? I know I need to boot into some OS with this thing as the non boot drive to get more info, I'll try again later but the last time it was like 20 minutes and it still hadn't booted even though this drive wasn't the boot drive.

 

How much do you care about the data

Runtime software GetDataBack
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-downloads.htm

 

I use OnTrack Data Recovery at work and it works unless the drive is clicking.
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/

If the drive is clicking, you need a Clean Room. The more it runs while clicking, the less chance of recovery.

 

I was going to suggest ontrack....You can also try to freeze the drive, but that never worked for me...

 

Thanks guys! I don't care much about the info since it isn't mine and it isn't a big deal to the guy if he doesn't get it back. So I'd like to do it for free, so I'll try some of these demos. The HDD just went into the freezer so I'll try that trick too. If he wants to pay for some software to recover the data I'll do it but I'm not spending my own money for someone elses data.

 

Format /u

I would have to read the boot sector, the partition table and the MFT entries you are getting errors for to know what is wrong.

If the drive is in the freezer, it shoul dbe ina zip lock with a dessicant pack. Leave it in for three or four hours, then set it out on the counter for 10-15 minutes. DO NOT try to spin it right out of the freezer.

Sorry I can't help more, it is kinda hard to tell what is wrong without the drive in my hands. Your error messages look like bad MFT entires, not necessarily a bad piece of hardware, but bad hardware can cause bad MFT entries, so....

 

Ive used runtime (getdataback) 3 or 4 times now with great success (with drives i or others have formatted) to retrieve data.

 

I don't want to Format /u cause I want to try and get the info off of it. I'm gonna plug it back in shortly (I just took it out of the freezer) and see how it goes.

 

I'm gonna try the get data back program but it's gonna cost $80 for it to save the files if they're recoverable!! but it will tell me it's able to recover them for free.