There are more than a few threads on DPC about: "My hard disk crashed, help...." I thought perhaps a thread about HOW TO RECOVER HARD DISK DATA with links to useful tools might be useful. I'll start with my recent experience:
I suffered an unexpected system crash last week. Some sort of memory conflict seized my ancient Windows workstation and I was forced to do a hard landing shutdown - in others words to cut off power. This shutdown caused the Master File Table (MFT) on my main data storage hard disk to be corrupted resulting in all my photo images files becoming inaccessible. I was in the middle of a project at the time....
I always back up my data to an external Firewire/USB drive. So the majority of the data was already saved. But no matter how frequently one backs up data, there is always that period of time between the last back up and the crash which is the problem. That period might be one day, 4 hours, an hour, minutes... more or less. Unless you're using a raid system or disk mirroring to an external drive, the data recorded between the last back up and the system or hard disk crash is in danger of being lost.
In my case, I ran a back up several days previously and only had a few folders of work to try and recover. I ran Windows chkdsk.exe utility to check the drive but because the MFT was corrupted, the drive was inaccessible. On system startup, I could see that the disk was still working, in that it powered up and was spinning. Therefore, I had to search around for some software tools to recover the data. To cut a long story short, I located Data Doctor Recovery. First I downloaded the free demo edition of the s/w. I ran this to check that it was going to be able to locate the data, which it did. The demo edition has the "Save" utility disabled. I then went to the website and paid USD69.00 for the full edition. Here is the link:
Data Doctor Recovery
My hard disk that crashed is a Fujitsu SCSI 80Gb. It takes a long while for the s/w to go through every sector of the hard disk to locate data to be saved. 80Gb by today's standards is small too. If you have to recover data like this, be prepared to spend 4 or 5 hours on the project if not more. If you have a 500Gb SATA drive, I bet that would take a long time to scan.
Anyway, the result for me was fine. I recovered the data - only a couple of folders since the last back up was very recent, reformatted the hard disk and am back to work on it.
If you have any useful links, s/w, or info, add it below....
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