Recovery of data from a failed drive

[UkiwiS]

Hi

I have a failed drive that I'm attempting to recover data from. I've never tried doing this before but figure it is worth a shot.

The failed drive is an external 500GB drive which I removed from the case and plugged directly into a working computer. On boot, Windows 7 wanted to run Checkdisk and I let it do that. It seemed to hang at 76% then the system rebooted into windows and the drive was no longer visible.

I then booted from a USB stick with IFL and was able to get a backup of the failed drive...I received a "Notice" on completion that said the following.
"The Backup completed with 549578279 bad sector(s) encountered.

Using TBIView I can open the backup and look at the folder structure but there doesn't appear to be any files within the folders. Is that normal???

I then resized the drive with Windows7 on it to around 400GB (The size required for restore was approx 250GB) and attempted to restore the backup to this smaller partition.

It took an hour to complete and failed with the following error:
Partition reduction failed (1/2/54) Please run a file system check

On rebooting into windows I cannot access the partition.

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

[TeraByte Support]

That's a lot of bad sectors, so those will be zero, if part of the file
system structure that would be why you don't see the files.

It's pretty much most likely gone, the resize wouldn't work with so much
missing, so no point in trying. You would just restore and see what, if
anything, you can access. Raw data may be there in some of the sectors.


"UkiwiS" wrote in message news:9850@public.image...

Hi

I have a failed drive that I'm attempting to recover data from. I've never
tried doing this before but figure it is worth a shot.

The failed drive is an external 500GB drive which I removed from the case
and plugged directly into a working computer. On boot, Windows 7 wanted to
run Checkdisk and I let it do that. It seemed to hang at 76% then the system
rebooted into windows and the drive was no longer visible.

I then booted from a USB stick with IFL and was able to get a backup of the
failed drive...I received a "Notice" on completion that said the following.
"The Backup completed with 549578279 bad sector(s) encountered.

Using TBIView I can open the backup and look at the folder structure but
there doesn't appear to be any files within the folders. Is that normal???

I then resized the drive with Windows7 on it to around 400GB (The size
required for restore was approx 250GB) and attempted to restore the backup
to this smaller partition.

It took an hour to complete and failed with the following error:
Partition reduction failed (1/2/54) Please run a file system check

On rebooting into windows I cannot access the partition.

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

[Bob Coleman]

No idea what the liklyhood of success would be, but I'd probably try Spinrite on the original disk.

[dialanerd]

Recovering data off a bad drive starts with running CHKDSK /R or CHKDSK /B.
When that runs to completion and marks the sectors as bad, then run the disk imaging program (IFW). Set it to ignore disk errors. Pray.
When that completes OK, then try mounting the image or restoring to another drive. Pray again.
Hope that this helps.