Any computer geeks out there? Here's a question....

I

ike

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I'm trying to copy the files from my Dad's old computer hard drive but am running into some issues! The old computer wouldnt boot up... just keep cycling through the BIOS opening screen (the one that tells what components the computer has) and Windows XP Media Center Edition would not start up. I removed the HD from the computer (it is a 200 GB SATA drive), and hooked it up as an external HD on my Windows 8 laptop via USB.

The laptop recognized the external drive, but did not read it in File Explorer ... after about 20 min it came up with a CRC error notification (drive not readable.) I ran CHKDSK G:/f/r on the drive (via Command prompt), and it came back with another error message :

  • The type of the file system is RAW.
    CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

Anyone have any idea how I can extract the files from this HD? There are apparently a lot of photos my Dad wants to keep, and of course, he has no back up. I have some workable computers with the Win XP MCE, and Win 7... do I have to install this as a secondary drive in one of these then try again? I suspect I will run into the same CRC errors.

Also, I have a couple of IDE drives that my Win 8 laptop can't read. I suspect they are from Win 3.1 machines.... any ideas how to get at these files?

Thanks for your help!
 
It kind of sound like that HDD is going or at least part of it is corrupt given the file system isn't even recognizable. CRC error essentially confirms this as CRC is essentially error detection protocol. Your drive physically could be done, do you hear it spinning? Do you hear any clonky noises like somethings up? If it is physically damaged you're probably out of luck with retrieving any information with methods your average person has access too.

Now, assuming the drive is not toast, given your dads computer kept restarting I can almost guarantee your MBR partition table is corrupt. How much if anything else is damaged I dont know. The reason you're getting the RAW error because the filesystem type is unavailable, its kind of like a "I dont know what im looking at" error which can also occur if the partition table is lost.

I would personally hook it up directly to a computer and try to run it as a secondary. If it still doesn't work you can try to repair the MBR this way, you can find out how through google but as I previously mentioned chances are this may not be the only corrupt sector on that drive so it may not fix your problem.

Your last choice is to simply grab an online recovery tool. Chances are the whole drive isn't corrupt and there's still salvageable data. I personally don't know of any off the top of my head but you should scour forms like tomshardware to find some suggestions.

As far as your IDE hard drives are concerned that's a bit of a hard one haha. I'm not sure if there are external IDE readers out there or if its even possible (not to familiar with IDE apart from it being a nice fat connector for each data bit I presume). But something from a Win 3.1 machine I would wonder if you can even do anything with those files depending on their type. So I don't really have a clear answer here.

Anyway, I wish I could spend more time on this but I've got an exam to write in two days. Thought I'd try to give you a general idea of where you should be headed.

Good luck.
 
Thanks, igormon!

The drive is connected via a USB adapter cable to the laptop (awesome cable, btw! You can plug in IDE, mini IDE and SATA HDs. You can check it out here.) When I power up the drive, it spins up alright and doesnt make any undue noises. It has been partitioned into 2 drives - the second partition contains the recovery info (it's an HP computer)- both have the CRC /RAW error when I try to access them - the drive makes clicking sounds when I try to access either of the partitions (which I have heard on other HDs that have corrupted boot sectors.)

I found a free recovery tool online called TestDisk that looks promising at rebuilding the partition tables and recovering FATs. I'll let you know how it works out!

Thanks again!
 
FiReSTaRT said:
Here's what worked for me in the past even though I only single-bagged mine, but double-bagging is probably a better way to deal with condensation
http://lifehacker.com/5515337/save-a-failed-hard-drive-in-your-freezer-redux
Click to expand...

Thanks Firestart! That freezer idea is amazing! It sounds crazy, and there are plenty of naysayers out there, but when you're desperate, you'll try anything. I have actually used the freezer method on an older IDE drive that was physically failing and it kept the drive working just long enough to get the data off it before it crashed beyond repair. I placed the HD in a ziplock freezer bag, then used a straw to suck most of the air out of the bag before sealing it completely. After about 10 hours in the freezer, I quickly installed the frozen drive as a secondary drive in a functioning computer ... it worked for about half an hour - just long enough to transfer the files. Whew!

In this case, I'm pretty sure the HD is physically functional, but the Partition table and FAT have been corrupted - probably by a power surge, since both partitions are not readable.
 
Calling them geeks and then asking for help. How nice. That aside, i've experience such problem many years ago and from experience, it seems like, as what has been stated, a part of your partition section/block is corrupt. You can try to recover the OS using a recovery tool or windows recovery via a windows xp boot disc.
 
Jimsun said:
Calling them geeks and then asking for help. How nice.
Click to expand...

The connotations of the word "geek" changed in the recent decades. Now it's not such a negative term. Hell, this forum is full of motorcycle-geeks :cool:
 
If the geeks don't get the job done, bring it to me, i'll put it in my bench vise and squeeze the information out for you.
 
Try downloading Bart's Ultimate Boot CD. It's a really useful admin tool and it includes a file recovery utility if I remember correctly. It successfully recovered files off my friend's hdd not too long ago.
Next, reformat the old hdd and run chkdsk again. Personally I would just scrap the thing because it's old, outdated and at high risk of failure. 1TB drives are cheap these days.
 
AF4iK said:
Try downloading Bart's Ultimate Boot CD. It's a really useful admin tool and it includes a file recovery utility if I remember correctly. It successfully recovered files off my friend's hdd not too long ago.
Next, reformat the old hdd and run chkdsk again. Personally I would just scrap the thing because it's old, outdated and at high risk of failure. 1TB drives are cheap these days.
Click to expand...

I think its not an issue of money and new hdd but an issue retrieving old data. I sure as hell will pay money for that hdd if it were to fail and its the last place where pictures of me or my family could be attained
 
First of all do not reformat it until you've recovered all your data. In fact, the less you mess around with it, the better.

I have a pile of recovery apps at home I've had success with. If you shoot me a PM to remind me around 430pm I'll try to send you some links and/or post here. I've even had to recover corrupted RAID5 arrays and was successful.
 
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AF4iK said:
Next, reformat the old hdd and run chkdsk again. Personally I would just scrap the thing because it's old, outdated and at high risk of failure. 1TB drives are cheap these days.
Click to expand...
Don't do this. Recover your files and then call it a day. Worst case, if something doesn't recover you can try a different program.
 
Stop immediately and assess the value of the data on the hard drive. If it's worth a couple hundred bucks to you, then don't do anything further with it and send it to a data recovery firm. Any unsuccessful DIY attempts will only make it worse. I'm not saying success on your own is impossible, but many of these methods can be destructive and/or make whatever problem you're having worse.

That said!

"CHKDSK G:/f/r" <-- do not run this on a bad drive ever, for any reason. Same thing goes for de-fragmenting it (which a lot of people jump to as a first resort). CHKDSK is meant for fixing an inconsistent filesystem. It has its uses, but NTFS is largely a self-healing filesystem. If you have a hard drive that has some kind of physical failure, what this will likely do is just spread the effects of the failure over the whole drive ... which is bad. De-fragmenting does not fix anything whatsoever, in theory it may improve performance SLIGHTLY under certain circumstances, but any healthy computer that runs a recent version of Windows does this on its own anyway.

CRC error - this points to a problem with the hard drive controller itself. This is not referring to a CRC error at the filesystem level, but rather transmission of data between the hard drive controller and the SATA controller. Typical cause would be a crappy or damaged SATA cable. Since it sounds like you're not even using a SATA cable anymore but have the drive plugged in to some kind of dock, I'm thinking the problem is with the controller itself. What you can do in this kind of scenario (and it's always a long shot probably won't work kind of thing) is finding an identical controller board and swapping it on the drive. There are some websites that specialize in selling these boards for this purpose, but buying them is a gamble.
 
I recommend Recuva, R-Studio, Zero Assumption Recovery, or GetDataBack. I've had great success with R-Studio.
 
put the hd back in the old system, unplug everything, press and hold down the power button for 1 minute, then plug it back in, and power it up.

this might fix the "not booting up" issue
 
Wow! Thanks for all the help! I didn't see many of these suggestions in time, so I went ahead and used the TestDisk program. The result was that I was able to successfully transfer about 135,000 files from the failed HD (no need to squeeze them out in a vise... LOL!) Now the fun begins... separating the wheat from the chaff!

Thanks for all the help and advice everyone offered ... it is very much appreciated!
 
TwistedKestrel said:
Stop immediately and assess the value of the data on the hard drive. If it's worth a couple hundred bucks to you, then don't do anything further with it and send it to a data recovery firm. Any unsuccessful DIY attempts will only make it worse. I'm not saying success on your own is impossible, but many of these methods can be destructive and/or make whatever problem you're having worse.

That said!

"CHKDSK G:/f/r" <-- do not run this on a bad drive ever, for any reason. Same thing goes for de-fragmenting it (which a lot of people jump to as a first resort). CHKDSK is meant for fixing an inconsistent filesystem. It has its uses, but NTFS is largely a self-healing filesystem. If you have a hard drive that has some kind of physical failure, what this will likely do is just spread the effects of the failure over the whole drive ... which is bad. De-fragmenting does not fix anything whatsoever, in theory it may improve performance SLIGHTLY under certain circumstances, but any healthy computer that runs a recent version of Windows does this on its own anyway.

CRC error - this points to a problem with the hard drive controller itself. This is not referring to a CRC error at the filesystem level, but rather transmission of data between the hard drive controller and the SATA controller. Typical cause would be a crappy or damaged SATA cable. Since it sounds like you're not even using a SATA cable anymore but have the drive plugged in to some kind of dock, I'm thinking the problem is with the controller itself. What you can do in this kind of scenario (and it's always a long shot probably won't work kind of thing) is finding an identical controller board and swapping it on the drive. There are some websites that specialize in selling these boards for this purpose, but buying them is a gamble.
Click to expand...

I've seen the same errors occur when there are grown bad sectors early on in the drive, making it impossible to load partition structure or allocation information. A drive with errors in these areas is toast.
 
Rob MacLennan said:
I've seen the same errors occur when there are grown bad sectors early on in the drive, making it impossible to load partition structure or allocation information. A drive with errors in these areas is toast.
Click to expand...

The allocation information is stored in the first sector of the disk.
The first sector is replicated to the last sector of the drive. Any file/disk recovery program will compare these two sectors (chances are you won't lose both).

If it all goes pear shaped you can use this FAT to rebuild the data after you do a "raw" data copy of the disk.
 
Jimsun said:
I think its not an issue of money and new hdd but an issue retrieving old data. I sure as hell will pay money for that hdd if it were to fail and its the last place where pictures of me or my family could be attained
Click to expand...

unL33T said:
Don't do this. Recover your files and then call it a day. Worst case, if something doesn't recover you can try a different program.
Click to expand...

Did you guys read my entire post?

AF4iK said:
Try downloading Bart's Ultimate Boot CD. It's a really useful admin tool and it includes a file recovery utility if I remember correctly. It successfully recovered files off my friend's hdd not too long ago.
Next, reformat the old hdd and run chkdsk again. Personally I would just scrap the thing because it's old, outdated and at high risk of failure. 1TB drives are cheap these days.
Click to expand...

Reformatting and/or scrapping the disk happens after recovering the files. The reformat + chkdsk recommendation is to see if it's worth keeping at that point (ie, data corruption vs physical malfunction).
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