thx fellas.
the stressful part is how long each scan takes - and then seeing 0 results or unreadable results.
this will be my hobby/life for the foreseeable future -
Hi edgar, I haven't followed this thread but a friend has let me know about your situation. I'd like to help you with advice (on the proviso of 'all care and no responsibility'). Firstly, I'm not here to harp on about backups, which you now appreciate the value of doing regularly, I'm sure, but would like to try to assist you with getting your data back if possible.
I've had a read through your post history from the last week in order to get a handle on the situation. It sounds like it all started when you ran 'CHKDSK /r /f C:'. To read that you had a grinding and clicking disk on day 4 (!!) of the process leaves little doubt in my mind that your hard drive is approaching internal failure. Here's what I suggest you might try next:
1. CREATE AN IMAGE: Firstly, you should
immediately stop running data recovery software if you're not working from a disk image. Your drive is very probably dying, so your first priority is to get a full copy of its current logical state, ideally including content in bad sectors whereever possible, as FallingKnife
recommended earlier. You'd use various software tools to do this from a healthy hard drive, but for a drive with what sounds like numerous bad sectors, the safer and more complete option would be to use a hardware disk imager. The model I prefer in my small data recovery lab is worth several thousand dollars but there are some options on Amazon and similar that do an okay job for
around $150 - but they generally skip any sector that doesn't yield data within a certain amount of time (typically 300ms) so if your disk is failing and you need the data in the areas marked as 'bad', you'll only have an image with data from the healthy areas with zero-filled gaps for all bad or slow sectors it encountered. Thus, you may be out of luck in the DIY department. YMMV.
2. BACKUP THE IMAGE: Once you have your disk image, retire your failing hard drive from use. Now make a copy of the disk image as we're going to modify it in the next step.
3. MOUNT THE IMAGE COPY: Mount your copy of the disk image using ImDisk (
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk). It should now be accessible as a drive letter in Computer, or at least visible to data recovery software and so on.
4. TRY TO FIX IT: CHKDSK shouldn't (not 'doesn't', but shouldn't) leave a healthy hard drive in a worse logical state than when it started, even when interrupted. In your case, logical damage has occurred probably on account of the deteriorating physical state of your drive, so the first thing to do is to try to repair the damage by actually running CHKDSK /f again. You wouldn't dream of doing this on the failing hard drive, but now you have a disk image you can work from, it's safe to try and you have nothing to lose. Run it on the mounted disk image then test to see if your files are intact.
5. SCAN THE REPAIRED IMAGE: Working from your 'repaired' disk image (the one where CHKDSK has run again), try running Active@ Recovery (
http://www.partition-recovery.com/). This is a little different to using other data recovery software as it is designed to work with logical damage and may be able to repair your file system enough for recovery.
5b. SCAN THE UNREPAIRED IMAGE: If Active@ Recovery finds nothing from your repaired disk image, try mounting your unmodified disk image and running it again. Cross your fingers as this is the last piece of advice I have for you. Good luck.
(EDIT. was typing this and missed the latest posts. Glad to hear there may be progress. Good luck!)
