What about plopping it in the freezer for a few hours?
I actually have one on ice right now as a mater of fact. I'm just about to take it out to see what info I can pull from it before it warms up.
When I pulled it from the customer's rig I found "BAD" written on it. I'm going to suggest that this person think long and hard about going to this company ever again.
At least companies like this one mean that guys like me can make some money on the side.
***EDIT: While freezing the drive didn't make it pop up in Computer it did show up in Disk Manager meaning it was being recognized finally and made it so I could pull the info from it using PhotoRec. It lasted overnight, which is odd. I thought that once it warmed up it would have crapped out again but hey, my customer will be happy to have some of their 5 years worth of pictures back.
Maybe now they will take my advice about backing things up.
Realizing original posting was in 2007, but very topical for my follow-up question, and hoping (thrax? or others...) could answer, relating to removing hard drive from one computer and accessing it via external enclosure on another computer:
In this case, talking about XP (or Win7) operating systems. Are there any issues or downsides of doing work on hard drive (which is the system and boot drive) of one computer if you have it attached to another computer externally? I have often performed disk checking (chkdsk /r etc..) with a drive from one XP computer attached to another XP computer.
Scenario: PC-1 reports file errors, or worse, so perform chkdsk using PC-2 with HDD from PC-1 in external enclosure.
Do NTFS filesystem 'fixes' from chkdsk performed externally using PC-2 on PC-1's drive screw up the permissions or impact registry issues when the drive is replaced in PC-1 ? Is this technique viable or for any reason not recommended?
Obviously PC-2 "sees" the external drive and accesses it 'live' within Windows, but not sure what it does at first, some sort of analysis, preliminary indexing? Can that negatively affect the operating system when the drive is ultimately placed back in PC-1?
Secondly, and this might be getting too off-topic, but maybe steer me in right direction for issues relating to cloning one drive onto another drive using disk imaging software, and issues relating to NTFS and OS registry if attaching drive to another computer externally? I got brand new laptop with Windows 7, used Acronis Disk Director 11 to clone the drive to a new SSD drive, but can't remember now the option to clone the NTFS signature or create a new one.
Anyway, it seemed the cloning worked fine, and I transferred files (but also some shortcuts and links) directly from another computer hard drive, again in external enclosure, but was XP machine,) and later noticed some stuff in the Windows registry. Maybe it's my lack of deep expertise in Windows registry, but there are a number of subkeys under HKey_USERS (like S-1-5-21-73543820-222930649-3084469134-1008.) I don't know if they were there to begin with, but I also noticed a number of areas where folders and all subfolders and files had NTFS permissions that included another user that was missing from the computer. Could that have been from "forcing" access to some folders while testing or while the hard drive was attached to another computer? (At various times, I had the computer booted to the original hard drive with the cloned SSD drive attached externally. Could that have screwed up some permissions and/or added additional 'users' in the registry that I obviously didn't realize at the time? If the computer and all programs seem to be running fine, should I just not worry about it?
I hope some of you will have insight for me! THANKS !!
I can't help with your cloning questions, but I can confirm that performing a chkdsk on one PC before placing it back in the original PC is perfectly fine.
Thanks, Thrax! But what happens if while you have the drive external, you access files on it using the second computer and perhaps force access on locked NTFS files from within Windows - does that add another user as having permissions in the NTFS file system that then carry back over to the original PC ?
If you force permissions on files or folders to access them from the second PC, those credentials will be stored in the NTFS meta data. If it bothers you, you can always go back and delete that user once the drive is restored to the original PC. The user name will appear with a question mark and a string similar to "S-1-5-21-73543820-222930649-3084469134-1008." In short, just record all the users with permissions before your force the permission change, and delete the new one when the drive is moved back.
I would like to ask, all these solutions are asuming that the GUI's can see the hard drive my external hard drive sounds great but you cannot not see it in anything and before I buy the second solution on here any advances on what I can do, what it does say in device manager is "Disk Unknown" not iniizalied, no option to add a letter etc, right click says inilized now?
Comments
I have recovered my data successfully...
So, Thanks a lot again Buddy... Keep it up the GOOD WORK...
When I pulled it from the customer's rig I found "BAD" written on it. I'm going to suggest that this person think long and hard about going to this company ever again.
At least companies like this one mean that guys like me can make some money on the side.
***EDIT: While freezing the drive didn't make it pop up in Computer it did show up in Disk Manager meaning it was being recognized finally and made it so I could pull the info from it using PhotoRec. It lasted overnight, which is odd. I thought that once it warmed up it would have crapped out again but hey, my customer will be happy to have some of their 5 years worth of pictures back.
Maybe now they will take my advice about backing things up.
In this case, talking about XP (or Win7) operating systems. Are there any issues or downsides of doing work on hard drive (which is the system and boot drive) of one computer if you have it attached to another computer externally? I have often performed disk checking (chkdsk /r etc..) with a drive from one XP computer attached to another XP computer.
Scenario: PC-1 reports file errors, or worse, so perform chkdsk using PC-2 with HDD from PC-1 in external enclosure.
Do NTFS filesystem 'fixes' from chkdsk performed externally using PC-2 on PC-1's drive screw up the permissions or impact registry issues when the drive is replaced in PC-1 ? Is this technique viable or for any reason not recommended?
Obviously PC-2 "sees" the external drive and accesses it 'live' within Windows, but not sure what it does at first, some sort of analysis, preliminary indexing? Can that negatively affect the operating system when the drive is ultimately placed back in PC-1?
Secondly, and this might be getting too off-topic, but maybe steer me in right direction for issues relating to cloning one drive onto another drive using disk imaging software, and issues relating to NTFS and OS registry if attaching drive to another computer externally? I got brand new laptop with Windows 7, used Acronis Disk Director 11 to clone the drive to a new SSD drive, but can't remember now the option to clone the NTFS signature or create a new one.
Anyway, it seemed the cloning worked fine, and I transferred files (but also some shortcuts and links) directly from another computer hard drive, again in external enclosure, but was XP machine,) and later noticed some stuff in the Windows registry. Maybe it's my lack of deep expertise in Windows registry, but there are a number of subkeys under HKey_USERS (like S-1-5-21-73543820-222930649-3084469134-1008.) I don't know if they were there to begin with, but I also noticed a number of areas where folders and all subfolders and files had NTFS permissions that included another user that was missing from the computer. Could that have been from "forcing" access to some folders while testing or while the hard drive was attached to another computer? (At various times, I had the computer booted to the original hard drive with the cloned SSD drive attached externally. Could that have screwed up some permissions and/or added additional 'users' in the registry that I obviously didn't realize at the time? If the computer and all programs seem to be running fine, should I just not worry about it?
I hope some of you will have insight for me! THANKS !!
It does help me to get back my data! Really appreciate your article!
Really thanks....@};-
I thought it was impossible to recover data from faulty HDD, until I tried this!