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  3. Need to recover a Harddrive.

Need to recover a Harddrive.

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  • R rnbergren

    Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

    To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

    D Offline
    D Offline
    dandy72
    wrote on last edited by
    #16

    rnbergren wrote:

    SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

    Some people still swear by SpinRite, even with SSDs.

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    • M Mark_Wallace

      So you don't use a cloud service for your photos? That's the safest solution for your pictures -- once the cloud service is hacked, you can retrieve accidentally-deleted pictures from any torrent site.

      I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

      M Offline
      M Offline
      Mycroft Holmes
      wrote on last edited by
      #17

      99.9% of photos I have are of interest only to me and the family, why should I care if they are hacked. The .1% would not be backed up to the cloud!. I just bought in to the Office 365 eco system, PC died, so I get 1tb on MS servers, all my music and pictures are now backed up to the cloud. Not sure what to do about the documents I don't want out there!

      Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

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      • M Mycroft Holmes

        99.9% of photos I have are of interest only to me and the family, why should I care if they are hacked. The .1% would not be backed up to the cloud!. I just bought in to the Office 365 eco system, PC died, so I get 1tb on MS servers, all my music and pictures are now backed up to the cloud. Not sure what to do about the documents I don't want out there!

        Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

        M Offline
        M Offline
        Mark_Wallace
        wrote on last edited by
        #18

        Um... Ask your little brother if he detects any sardonicism in my posting.

        I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

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        • B baloneyman

          Try sealing it in a plastic bag then toss it in the freezer overnight. Worth a shot.

          G Offline
          G Offline
          grralph1
          wrote on last edited by
          #19

          Tried this but.......... I always have uncertainty on the kilogram settings on the microwave defrost cycle settings. It seems to come to life when it dances across the platter with sparks and stuff. How can you tell if the HDD is over or under cooked? This method has never worked for me.

          "Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980

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          • R rnbergren

            Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

            To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

            S Offline
            S Offline
            Simon ORiordan from UK
            wrote on last edited by
            #20

            If your OS has gone tits-up then it might be worth trying Slax. Put it on a pen drive, run the script, and you'll have a full Linux OS that you might be able to see into the drive with. You'll also need a portable drive to move data to. :)

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            • R rnbergren

              basically a brick. Except when I attach it to an adaptor and hook up to another computer it recognizes the harddrive and then asks if I want to format it?

              To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

              L Offline
              L Offline
              Lost User
              wrote on last edited by
              #21

              rnbergren wrote:

              basically a brick. Except when I attach it to an adaptor and hook up to another computer it recognizes the harddrive and then asks if I want to format it?

              To me this sounds exactly like the issue I've had a couple of times with customers HDD and USB HDD. I have used Parted Magic[^] to boot from USB and then loosely used the instructions found here[^] to recover. I have found most of the time that the HDD is faarrrkkkked enough that rewriting the partition information didn't work for me. So at the point of searching or looking at files (P I think is the magic key) I find the directory(ies) I need and then copy to another disk. Hope this helps.

              Michael Martin Australia "I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible." - Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004

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              • R rnbergren

                Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                O Offline
                O Offline
                oglinucksrox
                wrote on last edited by
                #22

                I've had good results recovering data from mechanical drives. First rule: don't write to the drive in any way. With the computer off, connect the drive up the way you had it and it asked to format it. Connect another drive that has enough free space to contain the entire ssd contents of it were full. Boot into Linux and use ddrescue to copy the ssd contents to an image (or disk to disk if you can). Now perform data recovery tricks on the copy. Never operate on the original except to get a copy. Read only.

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                • P Pualee

                  I don't know what kind of tools it will take, but it can be done. I lost a disk and paid some hack to put it in his 'system'... in his garage. Three days later he recovered everything except the OS installation (the reason it couldn't boot). We agreed to $200 for it (before he started)... it probably should have cost more considering the time it took. I gave him a very big tip after I verified everything was there. This was after "Geek Squad" failed to diagnose anything... even claiming it was dead when I knew I could get it to spin up and read when slaved... I just couldn't recover enough info to determine file locations on the disk. Oh, and the critical nature of the files on the disk... my wife hadn't backed up her pictures... :confused: So now I bought her a $5 thumb drive... everything goes from the camera, to the computer, to the usb. And she never overwrites a picture on the camera disk (always get a new one)... that should do it... no more freaking out over pictures... triply backed up.

                  U Offline
                  U Offline
                  User 11063644
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #23

                  Wow $200, I did the same job for $50, still it was for a friend. Turns out linux could read the drive that windows couldn't. I recovered all but a handful of his wife's photos.

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                  • R rnbergren

                    Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                    To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                    X Offline
                    X Offline
                    xiecsuk
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #24

                    I bought a file recovery program from Seagate which managed to recover over 90% of a file that held a backup copy of my data disk. The data disk had been reformatted and I had deleted the copy file by mistake. It held hundreds of photos, many documents and other important information. I tried a number of free file recovery programs. None of them found many files at all. But the Seagate File Recovery program found most of the files.

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                    • R rnbergren

                      Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                      To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                      S Offline
                      S Offline
                      synp
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #25

                      Can't you contact the NSA and ask them for their latest copy of your data?

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                      • M Mycroft Holmes

                        99.9% of photos I have are of interest only to me and the family, why should I care if they are hacked. The .1% would not be backed up to the cloud!. I just bought in to the Office 365 eco system, PC died, so I get 1tb on MS servers, all my music and pictures are now backed up to the cloud. Not sure what to do about the documents I don't want out there!

                        Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

                        P Offline
                        P Offline
                        Pualee
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #26

                        Digital photos contain GIS information. If you give me enough photos, I can track your behavior, even without your social media posts... It kind of opens up the door for being victimized. I have no idea, or trust for the cloud to strip this out. In fact, I bet they consume it as meta data for advertising. And even without that information, some people who are closer to me could figure out the same info just from viewing the picture.

                        M 1 Reply Last reply
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                        • S synp

                          Can't you contact the NSA and ask them for their latest copy of your data?

                          R Offline
                          R Offline
                          rnbergren
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #27

                          Best Answer yet. I do have a nephew who works for something like that. He won't tell me. I bet he has a copy.

                          To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

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                          • R rnbergren

                            Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                            To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                            T Offline
                            T Offline
                            theUPSFlash
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #28

                            I recently used PhotoRec which is part of the TestDisk install (on a recent version of Ubuntu). It got everything back that I was concerned with (and then some... even a bunch of files from a previous install on the drive). The drive was NTFS formatted and the partition just vanished. It had been converted to an external drive and was fine on one plug in and the next it was inaccessible. I was very impressed. I had to comb through thousands and thousands of files to find the ones I needed, but I believe you can give it more information to only recover specific files. If I had been more calm at the time, I would have taken more time with the parameters to get fewer files but it wasn't too bad as it splits them up into subdirectories. TestDisk couldn't get the partition back but PhotoRec recovered what I needed. -mark

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                            • R rnbergren

                              Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                              To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                              D Offline
                              D Offline
                              davecasdf
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #29

                              (If you've any reason to suspect physical failure, dup it first. ) TestDisk ( on the System Rescue Disk ) will do a good job of finding - recovering "lost" partitions; if that's the problem.

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                              • R rnbergren

                                Anyone used TestDisk or DiskInternals? SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                                To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                                M Offline
                                M Offline
                                Murray Whipps
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #30

                                Don't know where you live, of course but here in Phoenix there's a company called Data Doctors that has been able to scrape data off very badly damaged disks for me. Apparently they can disassemble the disk and read the platter. There's probably a group like them in your area. I have never given them an SSD so...? And no, I don't work for them :) Murray

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                                • R rnbergren

                                  basically a brick. Except when I attach it to an adaptor and hook up to another computer it recognizes the harddrive and then asks if I want to format it?

                                  To err is human to really mess up you need a computer

                                  P Offline
                                  P Offline
                                  patbob
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #31

                                  There's not much you can do with a fried SSD. I'd recommend a SATA-USB, but it sounds like you've already done that. Put it in a Linux machine and see if you can use dd to do a surface copy into a file on another drive. Then try and see what can be done with that. You might be lucky and find that the only problem is that some early sectors got overwritten, like maybe the partition table. However, if its from a recent 8.1 windows machine (one that came with 8.1 preinstalled), then the data is encrypted and you're SOL even if you can read it off the drive from another computer, so there's no point wasting your time.

                                  We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

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                                  • P Pualee

                                    Digital photos contain GIS information. If you give me enough photos, I can track your behavior, even without your social media posts... It kind of opens up the door for being victimized. I have no idea, or trust for the cloud to strip this out. In fact, I bet they consume it as meta data for advertising. And even without that information, some people who are closer to me could figure out the same info just from viewing the picture.

                                    M Offline
                                    M Offline
                                    Mycroft Holmes
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #32

                                    Pualee wrote:

                                    I bet they consume it as meta data for advertising

                                    Yah so I can expect a flood of travel adds and how to annoy your grand kids. I already get more travel crap than I can handle and while I am quite proficient at annoying the little terrors, new ideas are always needed.

                                    Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

                                    1 Reply Last reply
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                                    • M Mark_Wallace

                                      rnbergren wrote:

                                      SSD drive

                                      Eek. Be prepared for the worst. An HDD has physical magnetic discs that can be read, even if there's damage. An SSD is essentially a memory card, so there's nothing physical to recover data from.

                                      I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

                                      C Offline
                                      C Offline
                                      Charles Programmer
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #33

                                      Well, like the spinning HD, SSDs have controllers that can be replaced with the right technology. Just because there's no rust, doesn't mean "there's nothing physical to recover data from."

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                                      • P PIEBALDconsult

                                        rnbergren wrote:

                                        off of it badly

                                        Then any tool should suffice?

                                        C Offline
                                        C Offline
                                        Charles Programmer
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #34

                                        A hammer's a tool. It is, it is. A hammer is really a tool. Maybe I'm a tool... ;)

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                                        • D dandy72

                                          rnbergren wrote:

                                          SSD drive went all bad and I need some stuff off of it badly.

                                          Some people still swear by SpinRite, even with SSDs.

                                          P Offline
                                          P Offline
                                          PIEBALDconsult
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #35

                                          SpinRite FTW! :badger:

                                          D 1 Reply Last reply
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