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*Updated* Active@ Partition Recovery
Posted by: JCJordan on Saturday, May 08, 2010 (17:21:53) (14 Reads)
Ever had the hard drive on your computer run fine one minute and then the next you get the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD)? Well, as long as the hard drive is somewhat readable, meaning no scratching or internal parts damaged beyond repair, there may be a way to save all of your pictures, documents, and other important files.
Over the years, I have used countless programs, cds, and hours trying to recover valuable data from corrupted hard drives and discs. I am currently in the process of testing out a program called Active@ Partition Recovery and Active@ File Recovery. One of my customers has had his computer for at least 7 years if not longer, so you can imagine the amount of valuable data that is on the drive.
Here's the situation:
Power supply went out about a week ago, easy fix. We replaced the power supply. Then, we powered on the system. It booted into windows, and said that it had just finished updating and needed to reboot. Again, normal, so we rebooted the machine. Everything was going fine, BIOS recognized the hard drive, acted like it was going to boot, then "Insert system disk and press any key to continue"... UH OH, not good. Luckily, I have other old hard drives laying around, so I put one in, reinstalled the operating system to the newly inserted drive, slaved the original drive, and booted the machine.
Again, BIOS shows the drive, Windows Device Manager shows the drive and installs the drivers, but no drive in My Computer or in Disk Management. I tried varying versions of Linux partition software and boot discs. I tried several windows programs to fix the boot section and partition tables, all to no avail.
The program that I found that would actually read the partition and hard drive information was Active@ Partition Recovery. At the time of writing this, it is in the process of creating a RAW disk image. More to come in the next couple of days.
*Update*
The program worked well as far as finding the default file extensions. It was able to recover many of the pictures, audio files, and documents. However, my main concern was being able to recover my clients email from Outlook Express and Thunderbird. I was not able to recover these files partially due to the fact that the 20 GB hard drive was very badly damaged. The hard drive had thousands of damaged sectors. It had also lost the MBR and the complete partition tables so accessing the files was difficult to say the least. I would still give the program high marks just for what it was able to find.
Over the years, I have used countless programs, cds, and hours trying to recover valuable data from corrupted hard drives and discs. I am currently in the process of testing out a program called Active@ Partition Recovery and Active@ File Recovery. One of my customers has had his computer for at least 7 years if not longer, so you can imagine the amount of valuable data that is on the drive.
Here's the situation:
Power supply went out about a week ago, easy fix. We replaced the power supply. Then, we powered on the system. It booted into windows, and said that it had just finished updating and needed to reboot. Again, normal, so we rebooted the machine. Everything was going fine, BIOS recognized the hard drive, acted like it was going to boot, then "Insert system disk and press any key to continue"... UH OH, not good. Luckily, I have other old hard drives laying around, so I put one in, reinstalled the operating system to the newly inserted drive, slaved the original drive, and booted the machine.
Again, BIOS shows the drive, Windows Device Manager shows the drive and installs the drivers, but no drive in My Computer or in Disk Management. I tried varying versions of Linux partition software and boot discs. I tried several windows programs to fix the boot section and partition tables, all to no avail.
The program that I found that would actually read the partition and hard drive information was Active@ Partition Recovery. At the time of writing this, it is in the process of creating a RAW disk image. More to come in the next couple of days.
*Update*
The program worked well as far as finding the default file extensions. It was able to recover many of the pictures, audio files, and documents. However, my main concern was being able to recover my clients email from Outlook Express and Thunderbird. I was not able to recover these files partially due to the fact that the 20 GB hard drive was very badly damaged. The hard drive had thousands of damaged sectors. It had also lost the MBR and the complete partition tables so accessing the files was difficult to say the least. I would still give the program high marks just for what it was able to find.
