data recovery problem

[Novusordo]

hey guys i need help fairly urgently.

i'm fixing a customers PC. The harddrive is unbootable so i"m trying to backup her data using winternals disk commander in DOS enviromet. The problem is that winternals is not listing the master harddrive, which I need to backup her data to.

whats weird though is that winternals did recognize my master harddrive when asking which harddrive i want to recover files from!

the setup is as follows: my harddrive is IDE master and her's is slaved to it.

[sc302 Veteran]

how about just booting your computer into windows and then copying what you need off of it.

[Novusordo]

isn't it more risky to boot into windows? could it further wreck her harddrive?

If not then I will do just that!

[sc302 Veteran]

turn off system restore and have at it. no more risky than running any other utility on the drive.

[Novusordo]

  sc302 said:

turn off system restore and have at it. no more risky than running any other utility on the drive.

ok well if this RecoverSoft Media Tools 5.0 which I'm running in DOS dosn't work like Winternals then I'll boot to windows and do it that way. Thanks for the systen restore tip but I always have it completely disabled.

"no more risky than running any other utility on the drive"

correct me if I'm wrong but running a file recovery app in a DOS enviroment is not "running" anything on any drive because it is purely from the CD disk. AFAIK only reads are done on the harddrives, and no writing of data whatsoever.

?

[sc302 Veteran]

no but it is reading the disk, if the disk is suffering from bad blocks simply reading from it will corrupt it more. Like I said before booting into windows has the same effect as running a dos or linux recovery program. Sure the heads don't necessarily go over the file table like it does with windows but as soon as you try to do anything with that drive it does go over the file table. If you had system restore enabled it will try to write to the disk, other than that the drive is somewhat in a dormant state waiting for something to happen.

So to sum up, even in windows nothing is "running" on the drive as it is a slaved drive, everything is running on the primary drive with the os on it. If scanning the secondary drive, with windows, dos, or *nix, the drive is active but it is not running or writing anything to the drive, it is mearly scanning it.

[Novusordo]

ok so recovering data in DOS is only beneficial when the harddrive is pysically damaged and a movement of the mechanical head may make it worse?

[sc302 Veteran]

Yes. As soon as it attaches to windows, windows tries to find it and search it.

Edited July 20, 2009 by sc302

[+Warwagon MVC]

As long as the bios see's the drive, i'd recommend spinwrite assuming it can see it. Could be a bad sector preventing it from being seen by all.

[cpressland2]

Well, I wouldn't bother using all these fancy apps and such.

Just load up a Ubuntu LiveCD, move the files onto a external hard drive/network share via drag and drop, trash the old hard drive and shove a cheep-o drive in or attempt to repair it with Spinrite.

[sc302 Veteran]

Why? Is it a cost issue, is it a personal preference issue, is it because you don't have the software to make a PE disk with all the goodies you would want? or is it because you can't make a bart pe disk that will do exactly what your Ubuntu disk will? I am curious.

A PE disk will allow you to pull data off a disk that can't boot. A PE disk will not let you look at the raw format of the disk, but any utility like recuva (another free utility that you can stream into a PE environment) can, as well as undelete. A PE enviornment will also allow you to modify the registry if the registry is in good shape.

Both of these utilites are Free that I have mentioned, and are legal to use and have.

[+Warwagon MVC]

I thought he said windows was even having a problem seeing the drive?

[sc302 Veteran]

  warwagon said:

I thought he said windows was even having a problem seeing the drive?

  Novusordo said:

The harddrive is unbootable so i"m trying to backup her data using winternals disk commander in DOS enviromet. The problem is that winternals is not listing the master harddrive, which I need to backup her data to.

whats weird though is that winternals did recognize my master harddrive when asking which harddrive i want to recover files from!

He said it was not bootable and that dos was having an issue seeing the drive, he never said anything about another windows based computer not seeing the drive. as long as the drive goes into a mounted state even without a drive letter recuva should be able to read and recover, if not there are plenty of other utilities that can be used. Windows is only limited by what the end user has access to, there are quite a lot of utilities out there for recovering hard drives and files that are windows based, some work better than others. RAW data recovery should see all of the files on the drive, although it will be an unorganized mess.

I personally would attempt a chkdsk /r in a recovery console.