Need to recover a Harddrive.
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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
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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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
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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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
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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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.
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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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
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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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
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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
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.
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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
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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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
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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
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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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
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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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.
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
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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!
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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rnbergren wrote:
off of it badly
Then any tool should suffice?
A hammer's a tool. It is, it is. A hammer is really a tool. Maybe I'm a tool... ;)
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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.
SpinRite FTW! :badger:
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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
Murray Whipps wrote:
here in Phoenix
Pssst... http://www.codeproject.com/Members/Tosche-Station[^]
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If they actually performed a service like that, then people like myself, (well if there are people like myself,) might not be so paranoid and resentful of them. Unfortunately, I believe we pay them for way more than just this kind of service, but receive nothing we value in return... not even the safety they claim to be providing us. It's just a way to take money, ideas, privacy and dignity from us.
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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
If it's an SSD, good luck. This is one of the main reasons I haven't moved to SSD drives yet, and if/when I do, they will only be for OS and program loading, and not for data storage. The problem is the way NAND memory works and the fact that the data doesn't stay permanently there if the drive has issues. I'm not sure if tools have improved much, but the last I've read (a couple years ago when the drives were getting popular), there wasn't a fool proof way to rebuild the file system when it get's corrupted. The data stored on a SSD isn't segmented into partitions and sectors like a normal drive, so when things get corrupted, the data is randomly stored all over the place without a way to rebuild the links (if it's there at all). With a normal platter based drive, I've had good luck with mounting in another computer to pull data off, or using a Linux boot CD to boot to linux and mount the drive to perform data recovery. I don't think either of these methods will work for a SSD.
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SpinRite FTW! :badger:
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
SpinRite FTW!
I can't quite make up my mind about SpinRite. Steve Gibson's technical explanations make sense, and the testimonies on his Security Now podcast all sound legit enough (I have no reason to doubt his sincerity), but I've always had less than stellar luck with it almost every time I've had a need for it. I *did* have it recover data, but I've also had it stuck on a particular spot on a hard drive for a solid week without making any progress. That being said, when people are ready to give up on a dying hard drive, it's still the first thing I recommend as there's nothing comparable out there. Any personal experiences?