How Do I Recover Data On a Corrupt Hard Drive?

[–] • 6 pts

There's no such thing as a virus that fucks up a diagnostic machine.

He should have taken the hard drive out of your laptop, and hooked it up to a to some sort of USB-IDE converter. I dunno iflaptops use IDE but the principle is the same.

He could easily image what was on the drive, and open that on a isolated virtual machine..

So he's lying or incompetent.

If your data is actually recoverable its as easy as I deacribed

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[–] • 3 pts

Exactly. Nice. I would have basically said the same thing.

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[–] [deleted] • 6 pts

Need more info. What does corrupt mean exactly here?

Without any info, I'll post the following old trick I've used before. Using your favorite Linux distro, use dd to copy a disk image and mount it, then perform diagnostics or recovery on the image without risking further damage to the data or drive.

I'll check back later for a reply and may have other options for you.

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[–] • 0 pt

Why is everyone telling me to use Linux? What does it do and can it recover my data?

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[–] • 3 pts

It's less user friendly. Much like an apple product is supposed to be way more user friendly, and therefore has many unnecessary restrictions upon it.

There's no GOOD reason an iPhone shouldn't plug into a Windows computer, and showup as a usb drive. Exactly like any other device would.

Same way my android phone should show up as a usb drive on my friends apple laptops

But it doesn't

Linux doesn't do that shit, and there's way more tools that do things easily..

Also you can jeasily have Linux on a bootdisx, or usb drive for specifically doing stuff like this.

It can even look like windows. I used lindoze distribution for a while.

But you have to know what you are doing more with Linux, than windows, or an apple product.

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[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

See Anticlutch's answer below. Linux is an operating system with more useful but dangerous tools at your disposal. You can boot from USB or CD and more. Now that we have your specific error, follow his advice first and report back. I'm not well versed with efi cause I'm an old fuck.

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[–] • 0 pt

These are the troubleshooting answers BIOS gave me:

error code 0xc0000185 EFI Hard Drive (WDC WD10SPZX-24Z10) Boot Failed

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[–] • 1 pt

https://www.lifewire.com/fix-error-code-0xc0000185-4691254 It's just a boot file corruption. You can fix the entire boot system with the windows disk. If that doesn't work but that is the issue then the data is still perfectly fine and readable. Unless you had it encrypted, then you're likely slightly fucked, but potentially not.

If unencrypted AND it's just boot files fubared then you can use a recovery program like recuva to scan the drive and recover the files. You'll need a second hard drive of at minimum equal size to the corrupted one to copy the files to.

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[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

Fucking efi. Last time I had a boot corruption, I dd'd the boot sector, fixed it, then wrote it back to the disk. Worked like a charm but efi... I set up a dual boot once with it and hoped never to have to dick with it again.

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[–] • 5 pts

Back up, back up, back up. It's no joke. You're learning the lesson many of us have learned the hard way.

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[–] • 3 pts

(edited )

"it fucked up his diagnostic testing machine"

hmm, doubt

I'm out $150

that sounds like a lot of money for a non repair? did he give you a technical explanation of the drive status

There are proper forensic hard drive recovery companies out there, expensive, like hundreds of $ expensive... I suggest trying one that a server forum would recommend.

recovery of data from a very dead hard drive is possible, they just replace the PCB with a test spare

some fucking virus

it would be useful if you detailed this, like if it's a ransomware one then you may be fucked

. And now the timely reminder for everyone else in here to think "oh shit...", and go and buy a $50 external hard drive and backup their stuff, then dump it on the shelf and never touch it again

then go buy a second external hard drive and backup their stuff every few weeks, or dump it on some cloud facility, or gasp, some DVDs (nearly everyone's personal stuff will fit on one DVD...)

. .

and a shoutout to this guy https://www.voidtools.com/

who wrote an excellent file search tool "Everything", that just works, so you can scatter your stuff all over the place and his app will still find it

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[–] • 2 pts

It was a BSOD. Windows couldn't find a driver and couldn't repair it. Guy still has my laptop but I'm not paying $150 for him just to tell me that he couldn't recover my data. Said he'll give me a replace the hard drive with a used one and re-install windows 10.

I don't know what kind of virus it was. Just one that completely fucked my computer.

I'm so goddamed pissed off

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[–] • 2 pts

(edited )

It was a BSOD. Windows couldn't find a driver and couldn't repair it.

First thing I would have done is get hold of a "live" Linux operating system on a USB stick (this is easy to do, look it up), boot your computer from that and see whether you can read anything off the drive.

If not, you could try recovery software (but that sounds like what your PC "dealer" did and it didn't work?) --There are reputable companies you can look up online that can usually recover data from any drive (unless you got some ransomware or something that encrypted it). Look for one that won't charge you if they can't.

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[–] [deleted] • 0 pt

sounds like windows update is still working right.

Actually I think it said likely "cannot find drive or something like that" it seems to me like the message when you leave a non booting cd, dvd, or floppy in the player and windows doesn't look for a hard drive when it's set to boot from a disk first then focuses only on the disk not trying to find a harddrive with a boot sector. That Metallica cd I forgot in the coffee cup holder stopped my system from booting..

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[–] • 2 pts

(edited )

If you told him it was a virus then he shouldn't have still been trying to boot the computer with it?

If you want the laptop back then tbh get an SSD instead

normally he will have a recovery machine that clones the hard drive without booting anything, a driver is not required. Then the recovery is done with that clone mounted as a data drive, and the original drive kept untouched in case it's just a dead PCB

he should also have been able to identify what virus it was to be able to asses the damage

Do you know any IT literate people? It shouldn't be hard to find someone better than that guy, they could mount the drive and tell you what the virus is, then you'd be able to assess whether it's worth the fee

alternatively, no fix no fee companies exist

personally I'd be asking him what steps he took to recover the data, what the virus was, and refuse to pay if he doesn't have a clue

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[–] • 2 pts

He wasn't able to recover the data and told me to ship it out to some specialist company in California which would cost anywhere from $200-800.

Apparently he's putting a new (used) SS HD in now for $150 and the diagnosis was free. Said he took the HD out to test it and it froze his diagnostic test kit/tool.

He still has my laptop and I haven't paid him any money yet.

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Load more (4 replies)

[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

Get your laptop back, buy a hard disk and put it in yourself. Easy peasy. Dude will probably put some illegal kmspico windows bootleg on your drive and you'll have to deal with that crap forever. That happened to me. I wanted to kill the dude. It worked but it's a pain in the arse.

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[–] • 0 pt

Also, you can probably reinstall Windows for free because your system will have a product key on it, or a built-in hardware key that Windows recognizes.

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[–] • 0 pt

Whatever you do keep your old drive. At the very least you can hook it to a USB adapter and copy data off it. It's probably not all gone. But like others said, boot off a Windows CD/USB and run the startup disk repair option.

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[–] • 2 pts

Post on twitter how the hard drive contains information leading to the arrest of hillary clinton.

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[–] [deleted] • 2 pts

(edited )

Try using a piece of free software called Autopsy. It's for forensically exploring data on hard disks. The popo use it to discover illegal images etc. I've used it to recover files on damaged disks with decent recovery. Hiren's boot CD might be able to help you as well. Hope you're able to recover your stuff- backup to an external drive and/or a cloud service (if you use them)

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[–] • 0 pt

Also Photorec (can scan for more than just images, you select the filetypes it scans for). I imagine OP's drive is probably mostly fine, so he'll probably be able to mount it and copy files normally, with a little minor repair.

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[–] • 1 pt

I had an ide HD fail clearly due to board.

So I bought a duplicate drive, swapped the board and recovered my data.

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[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

First you want to figure out whether it's a hardware issue. If the drive still works just doesn't boot, that's one thing. If the drive is physically broken, then the approach to repair is entirely different.

Plug it into a different machine and see if it still works. It sounds like that's what the tech tried and it didn't work, but who knows what it is that he did?

If the drive is physically broken there is still hope but it will either be expensive or will involve a lot of work yourself. Basically you buy the exact same drive model and swap the platters.

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[–] [deleted] • 1 pt

My personal view is. The repair place is using the corrupt drive will corrupt again so buy this over the top price garbage drive and it'll never happen again scam. You likely had a virus that corrupted your partition tables. You can get some program that is linux cd or usb based to start when your computer boots. It'll copy everything it can find bit per bit and make raw files from it.

Now if you use this you will corrupt the drive contents if you copy to the same drive so get a huge portable drive to save the files.

I can't remember the name of the program but it takes days, BUT is completely free and runs in a terminal and it's simple, it's called disk "something" and photo "something" but it's on the tip of my tongue. There might be a program out there that can somehow decode your partition tables for you.

When this happened to me it was because I punched my server tower so hard a stick of ram popped open the little plastic lever that held it down so half the stick was getting a partial voltage and the files copied partially corrupting the entire windows xp install. Lucky for me I had to hard drives and one was backup and I reinstalled the OS in less than 2 hrs with all programs and updates and was good to go. Always have a portable even and old one for basic storage needs. Sure it could get a problem but media like CD's and DVD's have failed me a million times more and then full time consuming backup disks are all shit so a second drive or a second computer to hold your valuable files is a must in my eyes.

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[–] • 1 pt

(edited )

1) Buy external (USB) hard drive of > size and format it so its ready to go. 2) Create a bootable Linux USB stick. 2) Remove hard drive and stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours. 3) When you remove the drive from freezer immediately stick it in laptop and boot to USB thumb drive. 4) Copy as much data as you can while the drive is cold.

There's a chance cooling the drive will not make a difference. Many times it does though. For at least a short amount of time.

Failing that you can send it off and they'll disassemble and try to insert the platter(s) into another drive and get the data off. Not cheap though.

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[–] • 0 pt

Boot off a live CD/USB stick. Could simply be something wrong with the bootloader, or the partition table. Not necessarily anything wrong with hardware.

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