Hi,
I have a customer who had a Dell Optiplex desktop running Windows XP on a Western Digital 70 GB SATA drive (single partition, and very small utility partition I think). Somehow his PC crashed (don't know the full details) and he shipped his drive to me to recover data. I mounted with a USB-SATA adapter on my Win7 laptop and disk management sees the disk, but sees it as RAW format and can't browse the disk at all. There are no weird sounds coming from it, as far as I can tell - it sounds like any other SATA disk.
I tried a couple programs including Recuva and ZAR but neither of those had any success. I then got a trial of Filerecovery Enterprise and ran a scan. It scanned the whole disk and actually found something like 27000 files I think (I didnt save a log of what it found unfortunately).
It went slow at first, then started going super fast when it started finding bad blocks. But it did find 27000 files, so I'm not sure if it may have worked? I went to open a sample .DOC that it found, but it said I needed to purchase a license in order to open it. A message also had come up though saying that the disk may need more assistance from Kroll (the vendor, who also provides data recovery as a service), based on the errors it found.
I also heard of another possible program called R-Studio, so I downloaded that and am running a scan on it now. Just to give an idea, this is what the scan shows so far: http://i.imgur.com/O0WUOZZ.png - Is that promising at all? Or does this not indicate much of anything?
Also while searching forums, I then heard about testdisk.
In this section of the wiki - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Data_Recovery_Examples - it mentions recovery of Dell specifically. But I dont really understand what it is saying, or how to proceed. In Testdisk, I got as far as this screen ( http://i.imgur.com/ImyKFuH.png ) which actually seemed kind of promising. But I have no idea what I am doing and dont want to risk breaking anything or reducing chances of recovery. So I thought I would consult the experts. Any ideas on what I should do from here? Am I on the right track?
Thanks in advance.
Recovering data from WD HD - XP crashed; now RAW
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When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
