External hard drive

[Jamie Cardoso]

 

Check out how to safely recover the data of your external hard drive without having to format the disk

 

http://jamiecardoso-mentalray.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/external-hard-drive.html

 

 

I hope you find it useful.

 

Regards

 

Jamie

[philippelamoureux]

Thank god I'll never have to do this because I save everything in the cloud nowadays! Thanks for sharing anyway!

[Josef Wienerroither]

Honestly, recommending chkdsk for a failed partition/filesystem is probably a disastrous advice

chkdsk directly workds on the broken file system and immediatly modifies the data on it, which is an absolut No-Go on a failing file system. But most probably you will loose data .

 

Recommended is doing a offline scan using some of the recovery software ( i would recommend R-Studio http://www.r-studio.com/, which is $79,-)

Those tools scan the disk without modifying the content, and allow to recover the data to another disk

After the recovery, you can format the failing disk again and copy back.

Again, running chkdsk on a failing filesystem or disk is a ticket to data loss: eg, Chckdsk is absolutly disastrous when the partition table or the MFT has been damaged .

Additionally and of course it even does not mean that chkdsk can bring the filesystem back to a real sane state afterwards, hence a fresh format or disk replacement is always recommended after recovery

[Jamie Cardoso]

Hi All,

 

Thank you for your input here. It's much appreciated.

 

Firstly, I have to confess: I'm no expert in this matter. However, since my recent approach saved my life (literally), I thought it would be nice to share my experience with anyone facing similar troubles.

 

My external hard drive contained my entire book manuscript; projects dating back to 2009; private documents, etc.

The consequences of failing to retrieve this data would have been catastrophic.

 

In the past, I have witnessed companies fail to retrieve data from their external hard drives, after paying over £450.00 to a data recovery company.

 

Finally, it's worth mentioning that, my entire data was retrieved, and it's working as expected.

 

Regards

 

J

Edited March 31, 2016 by Jamie Cardoso

[Josef Wienerroither]

Hey Jamie:

 

I totally understand your relief, i have been hit by such things myself several times ( most of the time because i'm an old computer tinkerer loving to toy around on an otherwise perfectly running system ).

I don't want to dismiss your effort to share your experience either - but the advice for chkdsk really can turn out as destructive and potentially dangerous. It worked for you and you can consider your self lucky that it did, but at the same time there has been a high chance that you do more damage leading to total data loss without ANY chance for recovery, even for a professional recover service.

 

I do not have experience with professional data recovery services first hand, but i bet there are many grey areas and companies. The only time i would contract such a service is with physically damaged harddisks on real invaluable data. Those services take thousands of dollars then, because the disassemble the disks and do recovery that is not possible without special equipment.

 

On the other hand, todays recovery tools for windows and it's filesystems are that cheap and powerful, that a technically fit user can use them to recover data without changing the original disk ( most of the time it's best to create a image of the disk and do recovery on the image )

And the $79 is a one time investment which certainly will pay off in a short peroid of time