Need help recovering some files..

B

Bonez

n00b
Joined
Jun 29, 2004
Messages
14
Hey..
How would one go about recovering something from an unpartitioned drive? With that I mean it doesn’t have a file system (no ntfs fat32 etc etc) or the file system is corrupt.
The reason why I ask this is because a friend of my dads did something weird to his laptop harddrive and for some reason the file system got corrupted and now (even when hooked up to a other pc with a laptop-ide adapter) windows doesn't recognize it as a formatted drive. Is there a program that can read from disks that aren't formatted or have corrupted file systems ? This drive had a lot of important data on it and recovery is pretty much a must.

I also have undelete home edition but windows needs to actually see the drive before it can work.
I was wondering if it would be ok for me to format it to ntfs and then run undelete on it, but I don't know how the format process works , is it that when formatting to a certain file system that it writes on the whole disk thus deleting all previous information and whipping out all possibilities of recovery?


Any help on this matter would be very much appreciated

Bonez
 
I was looking for something to recover some files myself a few days ago and found this

http://www.pcinspector.de/

Its free thankfully (other ones I tried were nearly identical but only allowed recovery of a file <16kb or something unless you buy)

You might wanna try it, it worked well for me, I recovered a few gigs of files. I feel like trying it on other drives lying around to see if I can find anything :p
 
Thanks for the replies

So I can format it to ntfs and then recover the files with one of the programs you suggested? cus like i said before windows doesn't recognize the disk (says it's a unformatted drive or whatever)...

Sorry but i gotta know for sure since i can't risk losing this data

Thanks

Bonez
 
dont format the drive

those programs will identify the physical disks, they dont have to be formated disks detected by windows
 
Also Ice Czar said that there is a boot cd called "ultimate boot cd" (how ironic) that has a bunch of format and recovery tools on it. you may want to google that.
 
recommend File Scavenger for recovery and Disk Patch for repair
can rebuild a partition table, and the master file table, File Scavenger will do a direct scan of the platter bypassing the partition and file tables, and youll need a place to write what is recovered

each runs about $40

dont reformat the HDD
and dont write anything to it ;)

its generally recommended to recover 1st then repair if possible
you can trial File Scavenger to determine what its able to see

Disk Patch Features
Recovery Features:
Rebuild MBR bootcode from scratch - write standard MBR bootcode while leaving partitions intact
Recover/rebuild partition table from scratch - FAT, FAT32 and NTFS support, also recreates Dynamic type partition if LDM database is detected
Recover/rebuild boot sectors from scratch - FAT, FAT32 and NTFS boot sector recovery
Verify the disk surface of the entire disk or selected partitions
Reclaim bad sectors by having DiskPatch write a pattern to the entire disk or selected partitions
Edit/recreate partition tables manually
Clone a (physically) bad disk to a good disk
Supports large IDE and SCSI hard disks (8 Gb >)
Create a backup of key disk structures, called an FSimage, for FAT or FAT32 partitions. The image includes the boot sector, FATs and the root directory.
View any sector on a disk
Image (save to file) and restore any sector on a disk
Supports hardware RAID 0 and 5 (NOT software based RAID!)
Mount FAT and FAT32 volumes even when the partition is deleted or the boot sector is corrupt
 
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