Hey ARP - RE: Your 'Puter Crash

  • Thread starter Thread starter Beck
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Beck

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A Reel Person said:
*If I didn't just lose a 40 Gig hard drive TODAY, I'd have a pic for'ya, but I believe I lost all that data PERMANENTLY! It's been a bad day for my 'puter in the office, but that's probably another post! :eek: ;)
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Dave, put the drive in the freezer in a zip-lock bag for about 2 hours and you can often recover the data.

I've used that trick several times over the years. I've even been able to keep the bad drive running long enough to transfer the whole partition to a new drive using Norton Ghost.

Works with Linux or Windows... I've recovered both that way.

Funny, I had to replace my home drive last week... must be that time of year. :(
 
Beck said:
Dave, put the drive in the freezer in a zip-lock bag for about 2 hours and you can often recover the data.
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I can vouch for this technique. Make sure you evacuate as much air from the bag as possible, and make sure its well sealed (not one of those zip lock bags with the really useful hole below the seal!).

Once the drive temp is down copy as much as you can as quickly as possible. If the drive is D and you have a folder in C ready to go called "Recover" go to the command prompt and use:

xcopy d:\*.* c:\recover /s /c /e /r /h
 
Guys, what is tech aspect behind this technique? (if it can be explained in a few written lines of course).
**********
so, to restore: for analog - you bake, for digital - you freeze?
:D :confused: :D
 
Hello! Thanx for your concern, but...

This was a format-corruption and resultant corruption of Windows, and not a "crash", per se, of the mechanical or electronic failure type.

My son was installing a game, which failed due to "disk full", but it did not error out gracefully. The install process crashed, so I pressed ctl-alt-del and then pressed "shut down". The system looked like it was shutting down, but hesitated an extra minute or two on the "shutting down Windows" banner.

It's then that I got impatient and hit the power. (It's hung up on shutdown before and needed a power reset). When power was reapplied, boom, "No Operating System". When attempting to mount this drive as a secondary drive, it says "invalid media type, unrecognize format: abort, retry, fail", and won't mount.

It's probably my own fault for hitting power during the shutdown process, and both my son & I were very upset about it, but it's basically corrupted, and I've rebuilt a bootable system on another bootable drive w/the bundled HP recovery disc, as well as having a 3-year old bootable image on another drive. Win98!;)

Thank God all my WAV files of my home recorded mix-masters were on another PC, in their entirety! At least I was thinking ahead on that! Whew! 9 years worth of mixes saved, aye!

My plan is to find data recovery software that can hopefully recover the bulk of my data, even though Windows format is corrupted and the drive won't mount by any other means. I've read by now there are numerous software titles that boast of being able to save data on discs with OS failures, software corruption, and on discs that Windows won't mount.

At the very least, I'd like to try to recover many hundreds of pictures, dozens of PDF documents, mp3's and whatever else can be recovered, 3 years worth of pictures and personal data.

That's the update. I honestly don't think the freezer trick is applicable in this case. It's not mechanical, bearings or track-drift. It's simple track/format corruption due to inopportune "power failure" at time of shutdown. From what I've read, there's software out there that may help me recover.

Thanx again.
 
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Dr ZEE said:
Guys, what is tech aspect behind this technique? (if it can be explained in a few written lines of course).
**********
so, to restore: for analog - you bake, for digital - you freeze?
:D :confused: :D
Click to expand...

It's a home-tech technique to deal with bearing failures of the HDD, and can help in certain "track-drift" situations, where heat expansion has caused the boot tracks to drift on the media,... eh,.... media expansion and contraction.
 
I was looking at GetDataBack software online last night, and was somewhat encouraged.

I definitely need something like that, & will look into it further.

Yes, the BIOS sees the drive.

Thanx again!! ;)
 
Bummer!

Try booting with floppy to dos and type fdisk /mbr to rewrite the master boot record. That’s saved me a couple of times.

If that doesn't work Norton Utilities is the best I’ve used for recovering a disk with corrupted partition info. Sometimes the free MS Windows FAT32 converter will do it as well.

I’ve used Recover NT for disks I had to reformat.

Partition Magic is another handy tool that will take almost any system and convert it to any other.

-Tim
 
It can't access or rewrite in DOS mode.

it simply won't mount or access in any way, at this time................ :eek:
 
Nuts!

By the way I should clarify... you only want to use fdisk /mbr if the disk is the primary (C drive).

And if you can’t recover it at all I recommend taking an axe to it or a 12-ga 1-oz slug feels good too. I recommend safety glasses if you use the axe on driveway or other pavement due to flying debris. :D

And people wonder why I don't put music on these things... :confused:
 
R-Studio is a good product, we have used it on a number of systems at work with 'accidental' formatting, partition table corruption and other issues. We've even used it sucessfully on pen drives. The only time I found it to be no use was recovering images from a corrupt xD memory card - for that I used Disk Internals Flash Recovery which worked brilliantly.
 
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