Oh boy, I'm running Clonezilla... I've run it several times, because everytime it fails with the same error: What's worse is this last time running it, the drive seems to have got worse... more bad sectors than before apparently. I don't know what to do. That program isn't free. I can't even download a trial version.
OK so at this point my guess is that the sectors that define the NTFS or the sectors in the NTFS that make it a NTFS is borked. Let me quote this: This is what you need. Also, you need the boot sector of that partition to be intact. TestDisk should help you. Send me a personal message if you require more help using it. Cheers, Oerg
If you can, try my suggestion from earlier. It sounds crazy but it may help your drive perform correctly.
Okay, it sounds like the MBT (Master Boot Partition) is toast for that section of the drive. While not the best, there are several Microsoft built in programs that you can give a shot. I'm going to jump out on a limb here and assume you already have a version of Windows running on the new hard drive... hopefully Win 7, but others will do. But... I'm not sure this will work, seeing as I'm not 100% sure of your system setup... here goes my best shot though. Option 1: Most, if not all, windows installations have some sort of recovery console built into the OS, which is normally hidden but can be very handy. During boot up, if you hold down the F8 key before Windows starts to load, it should give you a menu with several options. It should have a list that has several safe mode options and (hopefully) a repair selection of some sort... I don't remember what the exact name of the program is off the top of my head, but its worth a shot. Option 2: If you have the Windows installer disk, you can do a repair option from the windows installer. All you have to do is put the disk in, and let windows do its thing, making sure to boot from the CD/DVD. at a certain point, Windows should ask you to either repair the system, or install a new version of windows. choose repair, and let the Installation CD work. (Don't worry, it won't install a new version of windows on the system if you select repair.) I'm not sure on this one, but I'm going to put this in anyways: Option 3: If you can get into windows on the new HDD, and you have the old one in the computer, you can do a scan disk, or "chkdsk" as the program is named in command line. (Xp - Win 7) In windows, get to my computer and right click the drive that is giving you problems, and then click properties. under the tools tab, under the scan disk or error checking section, hit scan now. Hopefully, one of these three options will get your old Hard Drive up and running long enough for you to get the information off it. if anything, the disk sounds like it needs a full format, but I'm sure that's not an option until you get everything off. Good luck!
Not to be mean, but by the looks of it, I'd say that the entire hard disk is completely dead by now - from what he says, it looks like anything it tries to access eventually gets destroyed or something. By this point I doubt it's possible to recover that data anymore...
well... its possible to recover everything... its really just a matter of what ya are willing to spend some extreme recovery methods get expensive. Example of extreme file recovery techniques
When my old 200gb Samsung HDD failed, I followed this thing and it worked fine to get the files I needed.
At this point in time, I'd like to point out the absolutely fabulous results you've got so far by taking advice from people on the internet. Just saying. If you have the dough and the data is that vital/important, professional data recovery services do exist. They are expensive as all fuck, just so you know, but they may just save your bacon. If, however, this is not an option (cost, time) or the data isn't necessarily mission-critical, you might have some results by performing the following actions: 1. Grab a copy of dd for windows. (If you have access to a linux distro, it usually has the very powerful, and dangerous "dd" tool built in.) Get it here. 2. Open up a command prompt window and navigate to wherever you put your copy of dd for windows. If you run on Windows Vista or Windows 7, I advise you to launch an administrator command prompt window while using an administrator account for maximum chance of success. I've heard reports that on Windows 7, dd has some difficulty running under limited accounts (mostly to prevent programs from bypassing OS security measures by directly changing the hard disk bytes of critical files, etc.) 3. Run dd —list This prints a list of drives attached to the system (note: the drive has to be connected and visible to the system in some manner. If you get disk access errors or the sort, thats good enough. Find whichever entry corresponds to your dead hard drive. Will look something like \\?\Device\Harddisk<n>\Partition<n>. If there were n number of partitions, you should see n+1 entries (partition 0 = entire disk, partition 1 = first partition, etc.) 4. Run dd bs=512 if=\\?\Device\Harddisk<n>\Partition0 of=C:\Wherever\YouWant\TheCopy\filename.bin conv=noerror,sync \\?\Device\Harddisk<n>\Partition0 replace the <n> with whichever disk is the correct one. Just place a complete path to whichever file you want as your output file as the of= part of the command. File extension entirely optional and up to you, but I usually use ".bin" because it's a binary file. conv=noerror,sync - this just tells it to skip any sectors it can't read and replace them with zeros, so you get a size accurate image. This is important for recovering the data later. 5. Now that you have an image, shut down the computer and safely disconnect the drive. Store it someplace safe until you're sure you don't need it anymore. From this point on, we'll be working from the image file we created. If you have the space for it, I suggest making a backup of this image prior to using recovery techniques, as this will enable us to roll back any changes without having to re-dump the entire disk. 6. Go crazy. Er. Use whichever methods are most readily available to you. Testdisk keeps getting thrown around, and for good reason - it works pretty well. Works best when you make an image first, which is why I'd rather you do all that. Alternately, if you're truly hardcore, you could manually sort through the file byte-by-byte using a hex editor to extract the data yourself. Actually, that last idea was dumb, forget I said it.
Not from those infamous IBM "Deathstars" (Deskstars). I saw one person who disassembled his dead drive to find that none of the drive's magnetic material was still on the platters.
