As the title.... I need to recover a drive with 160gb of data :headvswal

 

Are there any good software packages out there that anyone can reccomend.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Rob

I've got stuff mate. What exactly happened to the drive, as there may be other things that can be done?

Dave

depending on how its broken,..plug it into another computer as a slave, get the bios to recognise it and open it in My Computer as another drive, copy the stuff you need accross. if it had a virus, you can sometimes scan and clean it before you transfer or even repair it to make it bootable again.

the pc hasn't been running well for ages. so 2 days ago i did a disk cleanup. when i did that something bad happened because most of the programs and directories had been deleted from my desktop.

 

I was well fooked off with this and I switched off the pc without shutting down correctly :headvswall

 

So then i dould not start it up. it said a dll file was missing (I forget the exact dll now)

I did a bit of research on the net (from another pc) and it said the boot.ini file may be corrupted etc.

 

so i tried a few fixes, but none worked.

 

Finally I temporarily put a skanky old 2.5gb hdd in pc and installed windows to see if I could do a scandisk repair to 160gb drive (i have done this sucessfully before...) but what I find is the drive only contains 5 odd gb of data ffs. Strange thing is, some old data is still there, but also some new data is still there. But somewhere along the line 140gb of data is missing.

 

Damnit..............

Forgot to add... I am running win xp pro SP2 (thanks to reg hack ;)) and drive is formatted NTFS

just remembered, the file that was missing was hal.dll IIRC.......

ohh, that doesn't sound all that healthy. I was going to suggest the same as fraser as a possibility.

Does the drive come up as still being a 140gb drive? I've never seen win Xp do things quite that disastrous as part of its normal operating. For microsoft its normally a very good OS.

I've got recovery software I can send you. It can read 'shadows' of old files. If a file is deleted all that normally happens is the pointer to the file is deleted. The actual data is still on the disk until it gets wrote over. Sometimes it is succesful, sometimes not. Worth a try though. It also might be corrupted tables on the disk (the pointers, so to speak), in which case the recovery should work. These are only random ideas but might be useful

Dave

if you have one of the boot .dll files missing u can put in your windows xp disc and do a repair to the system, were any of the files you lost made private to your log on? if so u cant read them from another pc, my tip for the future partition the drive 10gb for windows and store eveything else on the remaining space atb kev

best is to install XP on a fresh second disk and when finished connect the 160Gb drive as a slave and copy all data that you need from it to your new disk.

Or, you can use one of those bootable XP distros...but eitherway you'll need a second disk or network share to copy the data to.

Usually if the HAL is missing you can just get a copy from another computer, but it must be the same version of windows including service pack.

 

To get the file on the hard drive,

 

Get a windows XP or 2000 CD and boot from it, when you get to the first screen with options, select recovery console which I believe is F3 at the menu.

 

Then you will go into dos and can access the hard drive. Then manually copy the file from the floppy to the hard drive. Windows\system32 I think that lives in.

 

If you dont know how to copy do this.

 

copy a:\hal.dll c:\windows\system32

Once you have copied the file across a scan disc wont go amiss.

To do this in DOS, you type

CHKDSK /f /p

This will scan your disc for error and try to fix them. It may take a few hours. But be warned, if your disc is close to being terminal it could tip it over the edge and make it unusalble. But that is in the most extreme cases. 99% of the time it finds errors and fixes them.

 

You could also try doing a repair installation of windows, again is one of the options when you boot from the Windows CD.

best is to install XP on a fresh second disk and when finished connect the 160Gb drive as a slave and copy all data that you need from it to your new disk.

Or, you can use one of those bootable XP distros...but eitherway you'll need a second disk or network share to copy the data to.

 

 

I have done that already Eric, and all I can find on the big drive is 5gb of data. Somewhere 140gb has gone :( :( :(

 

 

 

To KEV.. I didn't want to do a windows repair at this time in case it renders the 'missing' data on the drive completely unreadable :headvswal

 

In future I will have 2 HDD's in the system. 1 for Win XP and the other for data storage. This way I can happily format C: and not loose the data from D: does this sound a sensible plan?? lol

 

 

Rob.

I thought the HAL file was specific to that PC?? maybe i picked up some bad info from the net on that one. I did try a few DOS fixes, but none worked Stu..

 

But the thing that bugs me is the amount of data that is missing. Where has it gone? Why has it gone? Have the file headers just been lost? Can I recover the data with software? It's all a right mess at the moment LOL.

If you can get on to the disk, there are lots of undelete apps that can do it. Failing that WINPE is good, it lets you boot up connect to the network etc...

 

You need to keep the disk as clean as possible, so having it as a second disk is the best option.