Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

914World.com _ 914World Garage _ OT: data recovery

Posted by: chunger Jul 14 2005, 06:15 AM

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone on forum has experience with data recovery from an HFS+ drive.

I purchased Diskwarrior, and was not able to recover the drive. The data is important, but not $600+ important to me right now. I have recording studio audio files I would like to recover and negative scans from a lot of photographs. I still have the negs, so I can re-scan, but it was a lot of hours scanning and cleaning up the files.

This was my backup drive that I copied important files to.. . when my main computer drive blew up, I thought I had this backup. The studio has not had any work in over a year while I'm under construction so I this isn't mission-critical stuff with paying clients, just personal projects.

-'Chung

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 14 2005, 06:19 AM

buy SpinRite from Gibson Research.... www.grc.com plug the drive into a PC and runt his program. It's saved my ass so many times.

i love it. it's only $90 too.

Posted by: redshift Jul 14 2005, 06:21 AM

Sorry to heart that Chung.. I lost 12 years of reels in a fire, and then lost all my personal stuff to a backup crash..

Yikes..

M

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 14 2005, 06:26 AM

chung, at my work, i've had the pleasure of telling people that their drive is seriously damaged and that I'm going to have to send thier drive to OnTrack......it's well over $1500+ to recover data.

SpinRite recognizes Macintosh HFS partitions, ext2, ext3, NTFS, fat32, etc.....

only thing is that it runs in pure DOS, so obviously it won't work on a mac.

i just hope the drive is IDE and not SCSI

Posted by: solex Jul 14 2005, 07:13 AM

Chung,

I had an NTFS HD fail on me. To recover the data I used KNOPPIX (it's free) and has some great low level tools that can read a damaged disk.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Also there is Tom's boot disk which has similar tools at: http://www.toms.net/rb/.

If you are interested I can look up some of my notes when I get home and foward them on to you.

Dan

Posted by: ematulac Jul 14 2005, 07:29 AM

I know someone at work that has some really sophisticated forensic software. He can recover ANY data with it.

If you want to go that route, just send me a PM.

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 14 2005, 09:17 AM

if its SCSI, its gonna be a you-know-what to find a PCI card...

Posted by: chunger Jul 14 2005, 04:51 PM

It's IDE. . . Maxtor firewire/USB drive. 200GB. . . it was too young for this

Posted by: anthony Jul 14 2005, 05:13 PM

I've had great luck with DiskWarrior in the past. What does it tell you about the drive?

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 14 2005, 05:57 PM

did you unmount the drive eact time you wanted to disconnect it?

Posted by: chunger Jul 14 2005, 10:36 PM

When diskwarrior was trying to rebuild the directories or something it said, "progress slowed by hardware problem" or something like that, and I let it try for a couple hours without progress and had to force quit diskwarrior. . .

The drive was connected and disconnected only when the machine was powered off.

So, diskwarrior can't complete the scan. Now, when I try to mount he drive, it says this drive contains no volumes os x can read.

From what I hear, diskwarrior is supposed to be good so I don't see it as a bad investment. . .oh well, I'll just keep the drive on the shelf powered off. . .until I find someone who can take a lookie-loo or until I can afford to pay for big-dog data-recovery guys. Probably when I hit mid-life crisis

Or, 'til I can get some more monies together and buy spin-rite and try again.

-'Chung

Posted by: rhilgers Jul 15 2005, 10:31 AM

Been down this road too many time with other peoples stuff. Its not a warm and fuzzy place ;-)

Its hardware. No ammount of special SOFTWARE readers may be able to recover the data.

The most common failure of these drive is the controller board. Not the one on the motherboard but the one on the drive.

PROCEDURE.

Ground yourself. Unplug, yada yada yada

Open the case and peel off parts till you have the drive in your hand.

From an IDENTICAL hard drive (same part number, even the revision number) swap the controller card with a tiny torx driver. Fry's has em.

Reasemble and mount the drive.

After recovering the data move the controller board back to the good drive and use that as your production drive.

Cost: One hard drive you needed anyway.
Odds: 7 out a 10 work fine this way.

Let me know if ya need a better walk through.

-Rich Hilgersom

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 15 2005, 10:36 AM

try the drive without the USB interface...i've seen dead USB controllers.

Posted by: chunger Jul 15 2005, 01:47 PM

Hello,

I was just about to try and remove the drive from the Firewire/USB case and plug directly into my IDE controller when I realized my 500Mhz G4 can only read ~138 GB drives with it's internal IDE controller. . . or some number like that . .

So I stepped back, and scratched my head and put the drive back down.

I guess I could try to find enough bravery to replace the controller. . . although I don't REALLY feel like buying another one of these Maxtor drives and at the rate these things change. . . I don't know if I'll be able to find the same drive anymore.

-'Chung

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 15 2005, 01:51 PM

138GB.....huh?

i dont recall a limitation for that....

FAT32 ended at around 130GB but........

Posted by: ematulac Jul 15 2005, 02:01 PM

Chung,

We were talking about your problem over lunch. Here's three options we came up with:

1) Do you have a spare smaller drive laying around? Install it in the enclosure end hope the problem still exists. If it does, get another external enclosure and that should solve things.

2) Do you know anyone with a newer machine? Ask if you could install the drive on their machine to see if it is okay. If it works, then you just need to replace the external enclosure.

3) Go out and get another enclosure and test the drive in that. I liked this option least because you'll have to spend the money for the enclosure without knowing if it will solve the problem.

Let us know how it turns out.

Posted by: chunger Jul 15 2005, 02:18 PM

Thanks Ed,

I'll try to find someone with a newer mac. I wonder how "newer" it needs to be. guess I can google and find out.

Unfortunately, all my "extra" drives are SCSI because my studio's hard disk recorder only uses SCSI drives. This one was backup.

-'Chung

Posted by: neo914-6 Jul 15 2005, 02:26 PM

Dude, you're over your OT limit! How's your 914's? Did you get your 930 flipped by RH?

Another OT: Do you know a good inexpensive architect?

Posted by: ematulac Jul 15 2005, 02:44 PM

As far as Macs go, newer OS generally means newer hardware. If you are on OS 9, look for someone with OS X.

Posted by: anthony Jul 15 2005, 03:14 PM

FWIW, a PCI ide card only costs about $30.

Posted by: chunger Jul 15 2005, 03:47 PM

Hey Neo,

930's been flipped like forever. . . it's just sitting waiting for a "rest-of-the-car". . . I do have running 914 A/X car now. . . it's still suffering from low oil pressure which I've been too pre-occupied to have looked at. . . plus, Brad's really busy, and I'm really broke

Good architect.. . well, it was a family friend who did mine. Eddie Chiang if he still works at C & A Architecture interior design (650) 558-8867. I don't know about terribly cheap, but he was good to work with. Tell him 'Chung sent you and no, he hasn't finished his house yet. . . but he's tiling the bathroom.

Is there an OT limit? I like my OT drivel. . .

Attached image(s)

Posted by: neo914-6 Jul 15 2005, 03:59 PM

Nice work, I remember tiling my bathroom when the contractor skipped to another job.

What's a ballpark cost to sit down with an architect and have him do plans? Is it a hourly fee? I paid a contractor/designer ~$1k for plans plus another $1k for a PE structural analysis about 6 years ago. You can PM me if you like.

How much did it cost to flip the r&p?

Posted by: chunger Jul 15 2005, 04:17 PM

It was over $3500 to flip the R&P/rebuild trans/refresh LSD/shorten case/weld case/install electronic speedo.

back to the OT:

I'm looking into trying to recover studio data to make backups from my "working" scsi drives, but discovered to my amusement that my scsi card is no longer supported for os x 10.3 . .. adaptec PowerDomain 29160N. Awesome. . . when connected, computer starts to boot, shows the little revolving loading bars, and pops up the translucent grey message bar in 5 languages telling me I must now shut down my system.

Guess I will find an IDE controller. . . poking around craigslist, I did find an ATTO Express PSC PCI scsi controller for $8 though. . . which appearantly is still supported but discontinued 7/1/05.

-'Chung

Posted by: Pnambic Jul 15 2005, 09:07 PM

I don't know macs at all, but I have had two Maxtor drives personally, and they both failed well within their warranty period. Maxtor was very good about getting me a new drive when the first one failed after 3 months, but when the second one failed a year later, I was done with them. I actually have an old 500 MB Fujitsu HDD in an old computer I used to use when I needed a third PC for games and stuff. That Fujitsu drive still works like a champ and its more than 10 years old.

For friends and family, I've replaced half a dozen drives over the last 5 or 6 years and all but one of the bad drives has been a Maxtor.

I've also never had an IBM drive give me trouble.

I'd steer clear of Maxtor in the future. Good luck!

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 15 2005, 09:14 PM

is it one of the one-touch series? if so, they blow....controller failure out the wazoo. two went bad at my work, well before the warranty ended. alot of crying and money paying.

life sucks, but its only downhill......

yeah. loose the maxstor. they blow.

Posted by: Brent Jul 16 2005, 01:03 AM

Chungster, I've had good results with Zero Assumptions (free).
-B

Posted by: chunger Jul 16 2005, 06:43 AM

Thanks for all the tips, guys. I will steer clear of Maxtor from now on. I like Fujitsu. I have a fujitsu drive I bought in college for a 486 that still works. Oh well, live and learn.

I was in a crunch for space on a project, and just went to Fry's and the Maxtor was what they had at the time. Bad choice.

-'Chung

Posted by: bd1308 Jul 16 2005, 07:20 AM

i like Seagate too...mucho $$$ but very nice.

I still have my RLL 12MB Seagate drive with controller card around here somewhere.