How to recover data from XP HDD

ballistic

ballistic

I ain't got no stinkin' visa!
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My PC motherboard blew a capacitor, or something, last week and stopped working :eek: I've now replaced the motherboard but the PC won't boot up using the disk that was running at the time... I've substituted another HDD and this boots up OK. I'm assuming that the crash has caused a fault to the boot sector of the HDD, or something similar.
Obviously I should have fully backed-up the drive immediately before the crash occured, but of course, this just doesn't happen :( I do have back-ups but there's data on the drive that I need, that's not on the back-ups. I took the drive out of the PC and put it into an external case, so now I can read it as drive 'E'. The problem is that I can't get access to the 'My Documents' folder where my data is stored... it comes back with an "Access is denied" message when I try to open the folder.
I've tried changing permissions, tried to access it from the Command prompt (DOS?), tried the DOS ATTRIB command, CHDSK the drive... no faults reported etc. etc. but getting nowhere.
Any 'gurus' out there know a way round this, or is it a lost cause :nenau
 
Fanum said:
Sounds daft but try it in 'safe' mode ;)
Click to expand...


Download a copy of Knoppix and use that OS to copy/explore your Docs.
 
Cant see its a lost cause at all, If you can see it your nearly there.

I think it is still being read from within windows as a master disc even though its an external device. Windows probably still thinks its a "live" operating system.

Take it out of the external hard drive enclosure and put it in the machine as a slave drive to your new HDD (change the jumper)

now give it the boot :thumb
 
redcastle may be right, the system you have now may be seeing two masters, try it as a slave.
 
mermoto said:
If that fails, I can recommend

http://www.pracproms.com/Pages/data_recovery.html

My hard drive packed up last week and they recovered and made an image of my damaged drive and copied it to a new drive I supplied. All worked well and a fair price to boot - no pun intended :D

Mermoto

PS was it a Maxtor drive?
Click to expand...
Funnily enough, it WAS a Maxtor drive... not too hard to guess that eh? What's happened to Maxtor? They used to be rock solid, but now they seem to have such a bad reputation.
What sort of costs are involved in imaging a damaged drive? I can start to consider whether the lost data is worth it, or not :o
 
redcastle said:
Cant see its a lost cause at all, If you can see it your nearly there.

I think it is still being read from within windows as a master disc even though its an external device. Windows probably still thinks its a "live" operating system.

Take it out of the external hard drive enclosure and put it in the machine as a slave drive to your new HDD (change the jumper)

now give it the boot :thumb
Click to expand...
I did initially think it might be a master/slave thing so I've tried booting from a good HDD on IDE1 and then... (1) Attaching the bad one as a slave on the middle plug of same cable... with the jumpers in both Cable Select and Slave positions. (2) Attaching the bad one as a slave on the end plug of a cable in IDE2... with the jumpers in both Cable Select and Slave positions.
I suppose there are many more combinations I could try, but I get the feeling that it's a problem with XP 'locking' the 'My Documents' folders... there are 'Admin' and 'User' logins on that HDD and I can navigate as far as both, but am denied access, even though there are no passwords on the logins. There's only me uses the PC so I log in as 'Admin' for installing progs, updates etc. and 'User' to log in and do my stuff.
 
Ok
The definitive combination will be to connect both drives on the same IDE cable.
Dump cable select and set your good hard disk to master and the suspicious one as slave.
Its important that the end of the ribbon goes in the master drive and the secondary fixing (the one half way down the ribbon) goes to the slave drive.

jumpers are fiddle isnt it :thumb
 
redcastle said:
Cant see its a lost cause at all, If you can see it your nearly there.

I think it is still being read from within windows as a master disc even though its an external device. Windows probably still thinks its a "live" operating system.

Take it out of the external hard drive enclosure and put it in the machine as a slave drive to your new HDD (change the jumper)

now give it the boot :thumb
Click to expand...

That should work, I've just done exactly that, I gave up on a beta version of Vista I had on one drive. I put my old Xp system drive back in as a master put the vista system drive back as a slave. I access the vista drive via my computer. Open it up and go to the folder named 'users' and when you enter that folder you get all the users there documents, pictures etc.
 
redcastle said:
Ok
The definitive combination will be to connect both drives on the same IDE cable.
Dump cable select and set your good hard disk to master and the suspicious one as slave.
Its important that the end of the ribbon goes in the master drive and the secondary fixing (the one half way down the ribbon) goes to the slave drive.

jumpers are fiddle isnt it :thumb
Click to expand...
OK redcastle, I'll give that a go tonight, thanks :thumb
In the meantime, just in case, I'll start pricing up Seagate Barracudas... they seem to be the current flavour of the month :o
 
ballistic said:
I did initially think it might be a master/slave thing so I've tried booting from a good HDD on IDE1 and then... (1) Attaching the bad one as a slave on the middle plug of same cable... with the jumpers in both Cable Select and Slave positions. (2) Attaching the bad one as a slave on the end plug of a cable in IDE2... with the jumpers in both Cable Select and Slave positions.
I suppose there are many more combinations I could try, but I get the feeling that it's a problem with XP 'locking' the 'My Documents' folders... there are 'Admin' and 'User' logins on that HDD and I can navigate as far as both, but am denied access, even though there are no passwords on the logins. There's only me uses the PC so I log in as 'Admin' for installing progs, updates etc. and 'User' to log in and do my stuff.
Click to expand...

Balistick, I was going to try and explore my drive using some programs I obtained, however, I decided that with even a reasonable knowledge I did not want to take what may be a one time chance to read the data if the drive is damaged or corrupt. My data is just to precious (75Gb of personal data and 15 years of pictures etc.) My reconing it was better to pay £25 to have the drive examined on the basis that if it was possible to get the image or at least My Documents copied, it then cost £100 to save it to a drive. A lot of money indeed and if it had been two hundred I may have had to think about it. It all depends on what value your data is :(

Good luck.

Mermoto
 
Just lke to add 'weight' to Redcastle's 'fix'. If the drive can be 'seen' it should be possible to view the contents.
 
Nippy Normans supply Touratech, Wunderlich, Desert Fox and many other makes of accessories.
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