Before anyone asks, this isn't me. It's my coach that wasn't backing up his data, and his drive in his laptop crashed.
What options are there to recover data? I don't think it's worth a ton of money to him to get the data back, but he has some pictures and videos from his fights, as well as some scripts for movies, etc. that he would really like to recover.
He is a good guy, so I told him I'd do some research. I found one local place (Action Front Data Recovery Labs), but they are very expensive.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Mark
hopefully the OS (windows) is just jacked.. try either to reinstall windows or put the drive as a slave in another machine.. (should both be ide.. just needs an adapter).. if it doesnt read right away, you can try some simple disk fix programs (norton, etc)
if the disk itself is damaged.. good luck.. big $$$
As long as the drive is not physically damaged (head damage, shorts, etc) you can take the drive out and hook it up to another computer (they have laptop drive to standard ata connector adapters available) and transfer files that you may need.
But if there is physical damage then you must take it to a data recovery center. They have clean rooms and special tools to deal with that, and yes it will be very very expensive. What's worse is that if any of the platters are damaged, you may not be able to recover much data at all even using the best of tools/data recovery specialists.
We see dead hard drives all the time (smaller laptop hard drives are even more of a hassle to fix). Sometimes you get lucky and the circuitry is just blown, then you can get a matching drive from the manufacturer (not just same model number, but the same revisions, specifications, batch, etc) and switch that out. You might get lucky and pull something between $1000-$2000 costs. When it comes to opening the drive in a clean room environment and repairing read heads and such you're in for some trouble. We have a forensic data recovery specialist we take dead drives with critical data on it (company documents, tax records, etc), you're looking at $2000-$10000+ for something like that.
If you can get it to work in safe mode you might be able to network it with another computer and pull the info off. BUT it depends on the operating system.
It's a pain when that happens. As the folks above said, hope the drive is physically okay -hook it up to a different system and try your best to get the data off to the new system.
Thanks to all for your suggestions! They have been very helpful.
I have not seen the system, but from the symptoms, it sounds like a software issue. Drive appears to be seen by the system, but cannot boot. I hooked him up w/ a local guy who is going to help him out today. Try to get the data off the drive, fix the OS or replace the drive if necessary.
The "Data Recovery" approach is very expensive, and he is going to try to avoid this. He is a relatively famous fighter, but in martial arts, they do not make "De La Hoya" money.
-Parallel the OS installation (IE: install a fresh copy of the OS to another location on the drive)
-In-place upgrade the OS (start install, F8 to agree, let it detect the old OS and hit R for repair). This will repair OS files ONLY and leave installed application info intact. This only changed MS registry entries, and does not affect any 3rd party apps.
-Slave the drive in another box (same as parallel but faster) to retrieve data.
Data is separate from the OS. It's usually never "damaged" in the event of an OS failure. You'll want to harvest Documents and Settings to retain things like favorites and cookies, as well as documents (my docs).
Maxx,
I have not been able to meet w/ him to check out the system, and he is not very technically savvy. The guy I hooked him up w/ will get him straightened out today, I am sure. I will talk to the guy who is going to fix it, and report back the findings. The "R" option is another one I didn't know about. Thanks!
We get unbootable PC's that have NT based kernels in all the time (Windows 2000, XP, 2003). You'd be surprised the amount of these that can be fixed by running a simple CHKDSK. You can boot off of a Windows 2000, XP, or 2003 CD and run the Repair Console option, get to a prompt and type CHKDSK. You can also use the switches after the CHKDSK /P /R (I think, one of those might be an F). This will do an extensive check and can solve a lot of these boot problems.
We get unbootable PC's that have NT based kernels in all the time (Windows 2000, XP, 2003). You'd be surprised the amount of these that can be fixed by running a simple CHKDSK. You can boot off of a Windows 2000, XP, or 2003 CD and run the Repair Console option, get to a prompt and type CHKDSK. You can also use the switches after the CHKDSK /P /R (I think, one of those might be an F). This will do an extensive check and can solve a lot of these boot problems.
Wasn't CHKDSK replaces by SCANDISK back in the DOS days?
yeah, its basically the same thing, but under an OS like Windows 2000, XP, or 2003 you can still run it under the repair console when booting off a CD.
We get unbootable PC's that have NT based kernels in all the time (Windows 2000, XP, 2003). You'd be surprised the amount of these that can be fixed by running a simple CHKDSK. You can boot off of a Windows 2000, XP, or 2003 CD and run the Repair Console option, get to a prompt and type CHKDSK. You can also use the switches after the CHKDSK /P /R (I think, one of those might be an F). This will do an extensive check and can solve a lot of these boot problems.
It's recovery console (or cmdcons if you want to install it to the local box). It has it's limitations, but is very usefull in recovery efforts. You can use it to swap out hives and run chkdsk
It all depends on at what part in the boot process the OS fails.
Linear Mode
