Hard drive recovery

Mank

Suspended / Banned
Messages
3,124
Name
Rob
Edit My Images
No
Well one of my trusty hard drives finally gave up the ghost this morning! :lol:

Plugged it in and it never showed up :(

I have many back ups of it, so no worries there.

Only issue is I had edited yesterdays shoot and didn't get the chance to back up the final edited images before it went a bit pear shaped.

Disk utility can't repair it from my Mac.

I downloaded some free trial software to see if anything could be done. And I've managed to be able to see the files, and from the preview thingy the files look, well a bit useless. They have black lines and dots all over them.

Is there any software I can use that can get these files back or repair them?

I'd rather not re-edit it if I can but obviously if I'm wasting my time trying to get them back then thats what I shall do!

If anyone can help that would be great! :D
 
Im guessing the drive is an external usb connected affair?

I've no idea how technically adept you are, but can you exchange the drive into another enclosure?

My experience of external drives seems to suggest that the drive is more robust than the usb interface built into most external boxes - luckily I have here an early Mac Pro with 4 drive bays, so external drives are rarely needed - but if the externals do fail, I extract the drive from the casing and temporarily swap it into one of the MP's drive bays whilst I check it out. Sorry that wasn't meant as a 'look at me I've got a Mac Pro' - truth be told, modern iMacs are beginning to outpace it!

More anecdotal rubbish from me.... I suspect that if/when external drives do fail it's during the power up/down phase when you plug them in - I've never had an ext drive fail that was perma-plugged into the computer.

Oh and apologies for the rambling *******s, back on track now, but if you've ever bought a Sandisk Extreme or Lexar Pro memory card, there's some very handy recovery software bundled (downloadable) with them - saved my skin a couple of times! :naughty:
 
Not sure how feasible the offer is, but I'd happily take a look at the drive for you, Rob.
Have a full array of repair software - Disk Warrior, TechTools Pro, Data Rescue, Drive Genius, and some others.
 
Im guessing the drive is an external usb connected affair?

I've no idea how technically adept you are, but can you exchange the drive into another enclosure?

My experience of external drives seems to suggest that the drive is more robust than the usb interface built into most external boxes - luckily I have here an early Mac Pro with 4 drive bays, so external drives are rarely needed - but if the externals do fail, I extract the drive from the casing and temporarily swap it into one of the MP's drive bays whilst I check it out. Sorry that wasn't meant as a 'look at me I've got a Mac Pro' - truth be told, modern iMacs are beginning to outpace it!

More anecdotal rubbish from me.... I suspect that if/when external drives do fail it's during the power up/down phase when you plug them in - I've never had an ext drive fail that was perma-plugged into the computer.

Oh and apologies for the rambling *******s, back on track now, but if you've ever bought a Sandisk Extreme or Lexar Pro memory card, there's some very handy recovery software bundled (downloadable) with them - saved my skin a couple of times! :naughty:

Its one of these Robert: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=640

I've had the casing off and some of the contacts on the PCB look a little hot, but not sure if thats the case or not.

Now I do have another WD passport drive, but I don't want to damage that one trying to fix this one if you know what I mean.

I was an electrical engineer in my past life (last job) and played around with PCB based control systems. So really I shouldn't be too bad at it. :lol:

Not sure how feasible the offer is, but I'd happily take a look at the drive for you, Rob.
Have a full array of repair software - Disk Warrior, TechTools Pro, Data Rescue, Drive Genius, and some others.

Thats very kind of you Phil? Where are you in the country? :)
 
download and create hirens boot cd here
try any of the free file recovery tools, some are excellent at this kind of thing

good luck
 
How long did it take you to do the edits? How long will it take to do file recovery (if successful) and how long will it take to find files are unrecoverable (if that is the case).

You might find it is more time efficient just to re-edit if it will take ages to find out you can't get the files back anyway.
 
A couple of hours Suz.

I just want to check really, as there a little bit of personal stuff (non work related) on there too which I'm not too sure I have a back up of.

It's less than a year old so going to take it to Currys this afternoon to see if they can do anything.

Where would I stand with warranty and hard drives? Should recovery be apart of the warranty?
 
A couple of hours Suz.

I just want to check really, as there a little bit of personal stuff (non work related) on there too which I'm not too sure I have a back up of.

It's less than a year old so going to take it to Currys this afternoon to see if they can do anything.

Where would I stand with warranty and hard drives? Should recovery be apart of the warranty?

No Currys will not cover recovery of data.
 
No warranty will cover recovery.

If you want to plug it in via alternative means buy an empty enclosure and put it in that, rather than take your other drive apart. Should only cost you a few quid.
 
If you want to plug it in via alternative means buy an empty enclosure and put it in that, rather than take your other drive apart. Should only cost you a few quid.

Which I apologise if I didn't make it clear enough, was what I was suggesting.

:)

-Rob
 
Mate of mine had a knackered hard drive (read/write problems, bad sectors etc) that had thousands of her photos on it. It had been formatted many times and new OS on it etc. Nothing I used could recover anything except R-Studio. I had to let it run for a week but it recovered pretty much everything. You probably wouldn't have to run it for so long if you haven't been overwriting the data etc.
 
Back
Top