Hard Drive error help at recovering data

[charlie28]

Hi, I'm new to this site/forum and am having a problem with a hard drive. I had two drives installed in this computer. My C drive had the OS Windows XP Pro on it and the other my E drive had most of my data and some of my programs on it. After some serious slowness in my system, I checked for viruses (none) and even tried restoring the system files from the Windows CD and even doing "last know good config." When that didn't fix my problem, I checked the "Event Viewer" and found some entries that say I have some bad sectors in this drive. I could see the drive yet not access it and would get errors saying I needed to format it - ackk!. All of these drives are formatted NTFS and I went to bootdisk.com to get some boot disks for NTFS drives. I tried to run chkdsk.exe on that drive but it would only check the C drive even though it recognized that both drives were NTFS?? I took the good drive out and tried to boot with the boot disk to the bad drive to check it but it wouldn't boot all the way and I got this error: RPL-ROM-FCC: 200 Invalid partition table. Where do I go from here to get this data? I at the very least need my e-mails and addresses, which are on the E drive and wouldn't mind restoring some of the other data too. I haven't done very much work on restoring data from a bad drive and am not certain. I have seen a few programs online to restore but what works best? I'd hate to spend a great deal of money and have it not work.

Thanks

 

[charlie28]

Oh, forgot something important. I also ran Recovery Console on this drive before I realized it had bad sectors on it.

Cheryl

 

[wahnula]

Zero Assumption Recovery is free to run

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm

but might charge you to recover files. Full program is $79

GetDataBack is another option. Is the drive making clicking or grinding sounds?

 

[charlie28]

Yes, the drive was making clicking noises when it was still in the computer as an E: drive (secondary). I chalked that up to possibly be because my running processes (ie Zone Alarm and McAfee) were trying to access it because I had loaded them there. What can be another cause of the clicking? I'm afraid to ask :>)

Cheryl

 

[charlie28]

Does anyone know what these clicking noises are?

Cheryl

 

[beel1956]

Clicking on drives may well be the read write heads thrashing. This is caused by hardware faults and usually the drive is unrecoverable.
It may also be a damaged File Allocation Table on the drive.
This is recoverable with disc tools usually.

 

[charlie28]

Well I used Getdataback to see if I could recover anything without purchasing it first. Most of what I have on there is NOT recoverable I suppose. I used the F3 key to view and can only see a few .doc files. Most of what I want to get back are family photos and such, which are .jpg and .jpeg and some .gif's and .bmp's. Is it possible that I can get those by purchasing the program or is what I see now what I get?

Thanks
Cheryl

 

[satrow]

Hi Cheryl, RecoverMyFiles ($70 to buy) is pretty good, you get to choose which filetypes to search for and there's a 'format' recover option that scans the disk sectors.

http://www.getdata.com/download.php

 

[creyes1]

Hi Charlie28

After is all said and done, if none of these great tips work you could always go to SalvageData.These guys are great and they have reasonable prices. They are experts at this and have helped me in the past, they offer a free evaluation to determine if the data is salvageable and if it is they would be able to provide a no obligation quote as to exactly how much it would cost to salvage the data.

(800) 970-7188

http://www.salvagedata.com/

 

[charlie28]

Well thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate it.

I ended up purchasing GetBackData for NTFS and it was well worth the effort!!!! Even though I could not see the files in the preview phase of GetBackData, once I purchased it and did an image of the file first (which worked much better than trying to do from the drive itself), I was able to restore every bit of data from the image - No loss at all. I kept all my family pictures from the last 3 years, my e-mails, favorites, and documents. Since I had the drive partitioned and it would read the music files partition, I didn't loose those either!!

I am so impressed. Thanks everyone :>)

Cheryl