Muzman on 14/12/2011 at 05:10
OK, some person I know tells me this tale and I have an idea I know what's going on but I'll check with the learned. It was vague, but I think this is how it went.
There's this external drive full of important rendered works.
It's been working ok on an XP system for a while.
It gets lent to someone using Vista.
Somewhere along the way something happens and now it won't connect. Vista insists it needs to be formatted. (very bad)
Inspection by someone (not sure if it was same person) showed all the data was still there.
This person then leaves the country before fixing it (assuming they could).
Drive remains in its locked in state
I think I've seen this before. The boot sector or the master boot record has corrupted itself and needs to be rewritten, or something like that.
I don't know though. I've never touched the this drive myself. What do you reckon? What program can you use to check it out and maybe fix it or salvage it?
Fafhrd on 14/12/2011 at 06:20
I know I had an SD card shit itself when my brother hot-swapped it on his Vista laptop once. I was able to get most of the pictures back with the trial version of a program that I can't seem to find now. It was Fat32 Recover, or somesuch (there's probably an NTFS version as well). The only problem was the trial couldn't recover my NEFs, so if this drive full of rendered works is in a format the trial doesn't support you might have to shell out for the full.
The process was a bit scary, since it did require doing a quick format of the card just so the PC could actually read the raw binary data off of it. Depending on how important these rendered works are, you might want to take the hard drive to a data recovery place and just pay to have them do it.
lost_soul on 16/12/2011 at 03:19
If it is REALLY important data, the first thing you should do is back it up. Use a Linux CD and do a "dd if=/dev/thedrive of=/home/user/filename.img bs=1M" This makes a byte-for-byte copy of the drive to the image file. This way you can "undo" any harm that may come to the data during recovery attempts. Then I would plug it into a Windows system and do a chkdsk /f (drive letter) to have Windows check the file system for errors. If you don't get anything back this way, you can use a program called Photorec to recover the information. It can do a sector by sector scan, searching for all sorts of file types. Obviously this takes a VERY long time and should be your last resort after repairing the file system.
Al_B on 16/12/2011 at 12:38
Quote Posted by Muzman
There's this external drive
If it's an external drive, it could be a problem with the controller and not actually the drive itself. With some (most?) of them you can open the external drive casing and get to the hard drive and extract it. Plugging it directly into a PC may give you more joy than trying to use the drive via USB.
