HELP needed for file recovery

**slotko42** · 04-20-2009, 06:24 PM

Ever have one of those days/weeks/ years (lifetimes)?

I had 1 TB of movies and music I had downloaded and it was scattered over several drives. So, I bought a new 1.5 TB drive and copied everything there in preparation to archive most of it to DVD.

Wiped and reused the old drives. Two bloody days later the new drive destroys itself. FRACK!
That is a big chunk of my life gone.

The drive thrashes briefly on boot. It shows in device mgr.
> Norton states the file table is corrupt.
> GParted states the drive cannot be access because it was not properly unmounted.
> chkdsk will not recognize the drive.
> Ubuntu linux will not recognize the drive.
> No commercial tools (Pareto, NTFS Recover, Recover data for NTFS, Diskinternals) recognize the drive.

Any constructive advice on how I might recover the music is desperatley needed.

you can email me at slotko42 at hotmail

**sparcode** · 04-20-2009, 06:35 PM

Need more information:
Disk manufacturer and model?
File system?
R-Studio recognize this drive ?

**saulin** · 04-20-2009, 09:01 PM

If you already wrote data to that drive after wiping it changes of getting full ISOs are not very good. Changes of getting small files back is really good.

I just lost over 400 gigs of ISOs and Movies. I was able to recover about 5 full ISOs out of maybe 80. None of the movies. I was able to recover lots of small program files though and favorites, documents etc..

I used GetData Back for NTFS. It took about 2.5hrs to scan a 500Gig HDD. The problem is when you write stuff over a drive after wipping it. It's very unlikely to get good data even if you wipe it again.

Technically if your system still sees the drive you can recover data off it even if windows doesn't see it.

**zot** · 04-21-2009, 07:07 AM

One trick that sometimes works (for a few minutes anyway) is to put the crashed drive in the freezer overnight (preferably on the lowest temperature setting). Better yet is to pack it in dry ice.

Although it will quickly heat up once powered up and spinning, running a HDD at a sub-zero temperature sometimes makes it possible to copy files to another drive while it's still cold.