# How to recover data from an NTFS drive?



## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Is there a way to recover data from a drive that got hosed. I was digitizing vide clips to a 200 G drive and for some reason the drive now says it is not formatted. I recall with FAT there was a way to reconstruct the FAT and you could get the data back as long as you didn't reformat. This is an NTFS 200G drive originally formatted with the Maxtor Blast CD.

Any ideas?


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## Redster (Jan 14, 2004)

Ouch. Other than a data recovery place where you have to send in disk, not sure. I have been searching for you,, there are a couple of software programs that say they can,, here is one that has demo. http://www.quetek.com/, this other one also says it has demo, http://www.highergroundsoftware.com/, not sure how much they let you do on the demo.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Hey, thanks for the leads, Redstar. 

I have about 145 GB of important stuff to recover but most of that is on tape and I just need to recover the small script files as I can redigitize the big stuff. Otherwise, I just have about 6 hours work to re-=edit a short web video, so there goes my holiday.

I'll check your suggestions out later tonight. It seems it was a result of trying to play a newer version mov in an older version of Quicktime that triggered this. That's what the experts are saying. Could have been worse. I need to rethink my archiving strategy so that the scripts are stored on some other drive from the big files so next time it won't take out the whole town.


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

I think there is a utility on Ultimate Boot CD.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Redstar-

YES! Completely recovered 145 G of data using the File scavenger utility from Quetek.

What a freakin miracle! 

I downloaded the free eval software and it found all my files on the drive. Then I paid the $39.95 for the license to recover the files. It took about 2.5 hours to scan the drive to set up the windows explorer type interface. Then about another 4 hours to do the complete recovery. Absolutely amazing. 

Aparently the secret to success is to not do anything to the drive that writes anything to it once the drive fails. I did that by pulling the drive from the computer. When I was ready to use the recovery tool, I reinstalled the drive as a Disk 1 (Disk 0 was the C drive for boot.) And, I attached a freshly formatted 1394 250G drive to recover the files to-.

At this point I have a 100% recovery of all data. I can find no errors. However, the original drive is still inaccessable to windows, so now that the data is all recovered, I can begin to reformat and run scan disk on the bad drive. 

This utility works! It has saved me many hours of reconstruction work just on the current project.


Anyway, I owe you one, Redstar, for steering me in the right direction.


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## Danny R (Jul 5, 2002)

Ouch... had to ressurect this old thread because I needed the info located here. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have done me any good.

I had a drive literally melt on me. It was a new 400gb IBM Hitachi Deskstar and it was scorching hot when it failed. The silicone (or whatever it is) gel used to insulate it had actually melted out from the seams.

Needless to say I'm not very confident any data on that drive is recoverable. And in any case I'm not going to pay the big bucks to get a recovery specialist to try and grab it as it was all replacable (although time consuming).

What I was hoping to recover was about 100 GB's of .avi files I'd just moved over to the drive from a different one. Unfortunately about 3 hours of heavy use preceded the crash, so thus far none of the undelete utilities have found them to recover.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Danny R- I have used File Scavenger several times during the past year but all those times I was working with a drive that did not fail due to hardware malfunction. I'd think that when a drive got very warm to hot beyond normal, it had some sort of hardware failure. 

What allows File scavenger to work successfully, is that you must follow certain procedures once you observe a dead drive.
1. You see the drive is reported to be "Not Formatted"
2. First before doing anything else, power down the computer. I pull the plug to be sure.
3. Disconnect the drive and reboot the computer to be sure nothiong else got hosed.
4. Power down the computer and connect the drive to a spare IDE connector.
5. Run the File Scavenger utility to see if the data is still there. You'll have three procedures, each one gets more thorough so try the simplest one first as it will take the least amount of time. In all my cases, the process took the most thorough recovery utility and a 250G drive would take about 6 hours to recover the directory structure. 
6. Once I knew the data was still there, I transfered it to a clean brand new drive using the utility, a process that took another 6-10 hours. 
7. In all my uses I was able to reformat the drive and use it again.

If your drive had some hardware failure, I doubt it would work like a slave being beat with a stick for a dozen hours to reconstruct all the data. You are most likely screwed. I've lost some scsi drives like that myself. 

Once I heard a drive begin to make some clacking noise and immediately stopped everything, began to copy all the content to another fresh drive. I got about 90% through before the drive just quit. Dead as a doornail! 


For a business that uses hard drives extensively, like I do, keeping a couple of spare hard drives formatted on the shelf ready to go is a wise practice.


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## invaliduser88 (Apr 23, 2002)

With that type of physical damage, I would think your only hope of recovery is to allow a data recovery company do it for you.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

invaliduser88 said:


> With that type of physical damage, I would think your only hope of recovery is to allow a data recovery company do it for you.


Do some services pull the disks and put them in new hardware? I'll bet that is expensive!


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## cdru (Dec 4, 2003)

DonLandis said:


> Do some services pull the disks and put them in new hardware? I'll bet that is expensive!


It is. But faced with the alternatives, not having the data could prove to be much more costly. I would imagine though that most consumers opt to just lose the data. Corporations that HAVE to have that data though...


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

I have seen a SCSI drive fail with thousands of manhours of engineering drawings on it. The network server kept reporting that it was being backed up sucessfully but we found out otherwise. We sent the drive off to a data recovery company and spent $1500 to find out that our recovered data was somehow corrupted. In the end it ended up costing the company tens of thousands of dollars to recreate the drawings. Technology isn't foolproof. :nono2: 

While were on the subject, never junk or donate an old computer without removing the HD or doing a low level format.


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

We're junking some computers at work. All have the drives removed pending reformatting, and I think there is a security wipe utility on Ultimate Bood CD.

With drives so cheap now, I have a 80GB as my Primary Master and a 250GB as my Primary Slave. I'm not using that much of the 80GB, so I'm using the 250GB as storage for Ghost Images. One of the features of Ghost is a explorer which allows you to explore the image and extract files. 

The backup takes an hour partially because I'm using high-compression and partially because the image is tested after the backup is made. I just run it overnight. 

I haven't heard good things about the Hitachi hard drives. I have a co-worker who is RMA-ing a 250GB Hatachi for the second time.


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

Mark Holtz said:


> ..............I haven't heard good things about the Hitachi hard drives. I have a co-worker who is RMA-ing a 250GB Hatachi for the second time.


 I haven't either. I've been using WD's for about 10 years nows and never had one fail. Knock on wood.


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## RandallA (Feb 4, 2005)

Hitachi or IBM Deskstar (previous name) drives are a piece of junk. We bough a batch of about 12 IBM Desktar and 8 of them have failed so far. 
At my previous job we had Dell machines with IBM Deskstar drives failing left and right. I can't remember how many drives failed but it was way too many.

I only buy WD drives for myself and they never failed me so far.


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## Bogy (Mar 23, 2002)

I've never bought anything other than WD. I had to check a minute, because I was pretty sure my new desktop had a WD, and it does. My new Toshiba Laptop has a Toshiba.


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## Danny R (Jul 5, 2002)

_Do some services pull the disks and put them in new hardware? I'll bet that is expensive!
_

Quote is up to $2700 to retrieve the data. Since the data was "free" (a bunch of Dr. Who files I can download again), I'll pass. Sad part was I had just completed all the episodes from Tom Baker forward.


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## CoriBright (May 30, 2002)

The more widely used name for them is not Deskstar but DeathStar. They are well known for their high failure rate.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Just for general information, we use R-Studio to recover whacked drives.

This is to recover from software failures (unformatted, etc.), NOT hardware ones.

Norton Ghost can sometimes recover enough good sectors from a drive with failing hardware to allow R-Studio to finish the job.


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## lee635 (Apr 17, 2002)

Yeah, *Ultimate Boot CD* is a great product. It's totally free, and I've used it on several hosed NTFS drives. Ironically, I also found a Linux tools disk that helped recover a couple ntfs disks. It's free too. I'll have to check for the name of the linux utility disk and post it later.

The best part of these tools is that they are so easy to use. You just run the program and it finds the corrupted files and fixes them. I used it on a couple of boxes that apparently got a virus that corrupts the boot sector. I love it when the box pops up saying it will fix the disk and is that OK? LOL



Mark Holtz said:


> I think there is a utility on Ultimate Boot CD.


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