Hard Drive recovery

[Leztek]

Hello all...

My first post here and I just want to say this site is great...

I have a quick question regarding hard drive recovery software. I have a hard drive with many bad sectors...

What, in everyone's opinion, is the best hard drive recovery software....

Thanks all...

 

[Simmy]

I'm a big fan of GetDataBack, which has worked wonders for me in the past. You can download it from here. Be aware that there are two versions; one for FAT partitions and one for NTFS.

 

[Leztek]

Thanks Simmy...

I'll check it out...

 

[greggh]

GetDataBack is great. It is by far my favorite for the actual act of recovering the data. Sometimes the drive needs a little work before GetDataBack will play nice with it though. For that I use HDD Regenerator first, then GetDataBack.

HDD Regenerator comes from http://www.dposoft.net/

 

[Joe The PC Doc]

Has anyone tried using SpinRite yet? I've been curious to see how effective it really is... Not free of course, but might be worth the purchase.

 

[greggh]

SpinRite is a decent tool. Some of our techs use it after HDD Regenerator. I've only seen it help in the process (hdd regen, spinrite, then getdataback) a couple times out of many. Usually just hdd regen and getdataback will do the trick for me. Sometimes just getdataback. But I like to use hdd regen because it helps in a lot of cases.

 

[GraemeP]

SpinRite is not a great tool in the form of data recovery ill explain why.

1. Most data recovery software will warn you about not to write the data back to the original source drive, spinrite will not do this, It could be your last chance to get the data back!

2.I have had a drive die while using Spinrite, due to the excessive read writes to the all ready sick drive.

Its is good at reading and reporting the SMART information and refreshing the surface of the drive altho you should have the data backed up to another drive before doing this.

You would be be better off using DiskExplorer for NTFS or DiskExplorer for FAT and getting the data back.

One more thing lots of people are under the impression that there dieing drive is fine when sprinrite is completed successfully to have the drive fully die days later

 

[greggh]

Thats all very true. It is not a good drive when spinrite is done with it. It is sometimes easier to read though. I maybe use it twice in a year. Mostly its just HDD Regenerator and GetDataBack for me.

 

[Leztek]

Thanks guys...

the software worked great....

 

[Blues]

I have my bosses 1TB HDD that he dropped and well it doesn't seem to read it in Windows. Would these tools give me any hopes and I have not tried to read the drive under anything besides Windows yet. He has something like 700GB of data on it so recovery is what I am looking at as I know the drive is dead. It is a SATA drive and I believe it is NTFS formated so before I go spend hours trying these recovery tools I wanna know what type of situations they may work in.

 

[crag]

Hi all

I am new in this forum and i have seen here some of the good suggestion regarding data recovery software i also have some suggestion regarding data recovery software which is i am currently using i.e stellar phoenix data recovery software it is quit good when your hard drive crashed or HDD found bad sectors and many more .

you can also download its free version from the site.

Cheers...

 

[bboy131]

GetDataBack pwns all!

 

[veedar]

What I try and do for my customers is complete OS/application/data recovery. That is I try to copy the whole damaged drive onto a replacement drive so that the system again boots up into Windows. And from the customers point of view its as if the disk failure never happened. Needless to say when successful the customer is delighted.

For this I use a free tool called ddrescue. It's Linux based but well worth the time to investigate. You might try it on a failed drive you have laying around.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

I've also had a drive fail completely after running Spinrite on it for a few days. It seems Spinrite is best when the drive damage is slight.

 

[hassal]

stellar phoenix is best ........

 

[Majestic]

GetDataBack pwns all!

agreed!! BIGGG Time!!

 

[seedubya]

GetDataBack pwns all!

Agreed again. Stellar Phoenix is OK but can't match GDB.

 

[Afford-A-Tech]

GetDataBack is the best i have seen, and sorry for rehashing a old topic

 

[Galdorf]

Software is ok in some instances but letting software hammer on bad sectors for hours can lead to drive failure depending on the mechanical condition of the drive.
Best data recovery for critical data reads all good sectors 1st skips bad backs up good data on another hd then attempt to recover data from the bad sectors.
There are many hardware+software solutions such as pc3000, ninja which im looking at to buy atm do a much better job and pay for themselves after a few recoveries.

Ninja-> http://www.yec-usa.com/products/ninja.html

Reviews by techs using it:

http://forum.hddguru.com/yec-ninja-initial-impression-t9518.html

aprox retail price $1300

 

[seedubya]

Have you done much data recovery, Galdorf? You seem to be very interested in it.

 

[Galdorf]

Yes i have done ALOT just about every customer that has a hd with bad sectors won't boot into windows they didn't back anything up so i end up doing data recovery.

On average i do 3-4 a week worst clients are doctors they never seem to back anything up, and businesses one taxi company was backing up there data on a corrupt floppies for 10 years and had no backups there there hd died.

I usually use software but it takes waaay too long so im checking out options for a hardware+software solution.

I can see the ninja would have lots of uses from data recovery, data backup, and migrating customers hd data to a larger hd.

One customer a speedy auto glass in my area lost all there data ,no backups as usual had to reconstruct there hd there bill was about $1300 took days with software with ninja it would have only taken 40 mins at most.