{"id":221,"date":"2011-10-26T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T09:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.thepcmechanic.org\/?p=221"},"modified":"2011-10-26T09:46:15","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T09:46:15","slug":"how-to-recover-data-from-a-faulty-hard-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.thepcmechanic.org\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"How to recover files and data from a faulty hard drive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings!<\/p>\n

Following on from my post about how to replace a laptop hard disk, this post focuses on data recovery from a faulty hard disk.<\/p>\n

Firstly the reason the laptop hard drive failed on my flat-mates laptop was\u00a0because\u00a0 it was overheating. This was a combination of dust inside the case, vista being a bit heavy and some undetected viruses on the machine. So to save yourself issues, if you notice you laptop\/desktop getting hot or over heating, make sure that it is free from viruses and give the insides a clean!<\/p>\n

I cannot guarantee that using the method descibed below will recover lost data on a hard disk, as hard drives can break down in many different ways, however it did work for me, so it may do for you.<\/p>\n

Problem:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hard disk is faulty and cannot be read correctly.<\/p>\n

Symptoms:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The disk I\u00a0recovered\u00a0data from wouldn’t get past a certain part in the boot-up sequence. I removed the disk from the machine found it to be a SATA drive. \u00a0Interestingly if you have a 3.5 inch disk caddy for a SATA disk drive, you may be able to conect a 2.5 inch laptop disk to it (which is what I did). The SATA and power connectors are the same.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After I removed the disk and put it in a caddy, windows reported that the disk couldn’t be read as it wasn’t formatted.<\/p>\n

Solution:<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a bit of research and searching I came across two completely free tools that can help you recover data.<\/strong> They are made by the same people, or should I say person,\u00a0Christophe Grenier at\u00a0www.cgsecurity.org<\/a><\/p>\n

The first one I tried was testdisk <\/strong>http:\/\/www.cgsecurity.org\/wiki\/TestDisk<\/a><\/p>\n

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Interface for Testdisk<\/p><\/div>\n

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It is designed to recover lost partitions. As you can see it doesn’t use a GUI <\/strong>(graphical user interface) instead it uses text commands. Its not too difficult once you get the hang of navigating it using just a keyboard and there is quite a lot of user support if you get stuck on the authors website, including a walk-through guide.<\/p>\n

I tried it several times with different options without success. If it had been successful, I would have been able to read the disk as normal, so I had to try\u00a0something\u00a0else, plan B.<\/p>\n

The second piece of software I tried was PhotoRec<\/strong>:\u00a0http:\/\/www.cgsecurity.org\/wiki\/PhotoRec<\/a><\/p>\n

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Another text based user interface program!<\/p><\/div>\n

This software doesn’t worry about partitions it just looks at the data blocks and clusters on the disk. The upshot of this is that you can recover any data on a disk if the partition table is missing, as long as the drive is not\u00a0physically\u00a0damaged in such a way that makes the disk unreadable. This includes\u00a0previously\u00a0deleted files and files from a drive that has been re-formatted.<\/p>\n

After going through some of the options in the program, you can choose which type of files you want to recover:<\/p>\n

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Choose the file type(s) to recover<\/p><\/div>\n

This is\u00a0extremely\u00a0useful, as instead of recovering all the data from the disk, you can just recover certain files such as picture\/photo files including bmp and jpg files. Of course you can still recover the whole disk if you want to.<\/p>\n

The one downside of recovering all of this data is the original file name will be lost. So if you had a some photos and one of them was called, ‘midnight in paris.jpg’ this information will be lost and instead you will get a list files that looks like this:<\/p>\n

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crytpic file names<\/p><\/div>\n

This means you will have to go through the results find the photos you want and rename them with a more suitable name. But at least you get your files back!<\/p>\n

It was this second method that enabled me to recover my flat-mates files and make him a very happy chappy indeed.<\/p>\n

Just make sure you have an up to date anti-virus when you recover old data from\u00a0someone\u00a0else’s disk!<\/p>\n

Final word<\/strong><\/p>\n

PhotoRec is a very powerful tool and enables you you recover data from damaged disks. This is not its limit though because it can also recover data from CD-ROM’s and memory cards such as SD and MMC. It also runs on many operating systems:<\/p>\n