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Ask HN: Help with Hard Disk Recovery?
Hi guys, I'm sorry this is a bit of a selfish thing to post on HN, but I desperately need some help.
I blew up my hard disk last night. I booted my Dell inspiron laptop with the Asus eee pc recovery DVD by mistake. It launched straight into an install. I realised within 5 secs and powered down. Apparently, that was enough to hose the hard drive and it wouldn't boot (I had a dual install WinXP/Ubuntu with grub). I booted with an old cd to get a dos prompt and tried fdisk/mbr but that didn't work either.
Googling around brings up loads of shady looking shareware software.
Does anyone know of a good solid software to retrieve lost partitions/data?*
Thanks.
*If not, maybe there's a business idea right there :p
- khafra 17y agoThe gold standard is forensic software like EnCase, FTK, or--if you're broke--ProDiscover. It'll take some work, but if the bits are still on the drive, they'll get them. Each suite has varying levels of expertise at reconstructing folders and files.
- revorad 17y agoThanks, I didn't know about those.
- ErrantX 17y agolicenses for them are insanely expensive :) but worth it. Encase is the best bet - it will recover all of the files into something resembling a directory structure. Best to go to a pro firm: £100-200 is a fair price to dump all your files to another drive.
- revorad 17y agoYeah those license prices are way beyond my reach. Hiring a pro firm seems a much better option. But I might tinker around a bit before shelling out couple hundred bucks. Thanks for the tip anyway.
- ErrantX 17y agowhere are you located and what stuff needs recovering? It's a million to one your near us but I might know a company in your area that's decent.
- revorad 17y agoI'm in London. I mainly need to recover some files (all sorts - mdb,xls,txt etc) on my Windows XP partition. Thanks a lot for your help, really appreciate it. edit: just saw your uk email id in your profile.
- sho 17y agoWow, the CD commences install without any confirmation whatsoever!? What terrible design!
- revorad 17y agowell it did ask something cryptic, i didn't realise it was asking to erase everything. it is terrible design i agree.
- phantom784 17y agoI've had luck with the open-source PhotoRec before. It scans a storage device for bits that match known file types (and it knows a lot, not just photo types as the name implies), and saves them to a new location. I'd definitely give it a try before paying for expensive data-recovery.
- revorad 17y agoThanks, that looks good too. I hope it works!
- RobGR 17y agoFirst, go out and get a USB disk bigger than the laptop disk, and use a live CD to copy a disk image of the laptop to the USB. That way you can experiement and write the original back if it doesn't work. If you had a dual install, the Ubuntu partition may not have been touched yet. However the partition table itself may have been overwritten. There is a free software tool called "gpart" that guesses the correct partition table based on the data on the disk, it may get you half way there, in that you can mount the linux part of things. For the windows part of things, the Asus CD probably started writing near the start of the partition, so you won't be able to reconstruct that. Lucky for you, all the user data is probably back a bit in the partition. I think I would try the tool "foremost" which is free software from the US Air Force's Forensic labs, to try to recover the windows files (and the linux, if gpart did not get you to a mountable partition). As for your business idea in retrieving lost partitions and data, it has been done, but I'd like to suggest a better business idea: backups.
- revorad 17y agoThanks a lot. Your first idea is very good, I hadn't thought of doing that. I will also try gpart and foremost. I thought backups as a business is probably already done well, so I thought recovery would be good. I suppose backups for individuals would still be a good idea. But I'd think there are still quite a few people who lose data the way I have and there just doesn't seem to be a good straightforward solution. None of the ones suggested here appeared on google.