A little help, please? File recovery from drive with damaged system
Posted: 06 Oct 2016, 07:51
Hello everyone,
hopefully someone can give me some advice, I am not a very technical person.
My old computer system had some sort of voltage problem from the power supply, combined with something wrong with the video card, which ended up causing damage to the C drive. I suspect the causes of my hard drive problem are not as important as what happened....it killed my C drive. Couldn't boot up anymore.
So I switched to an old backup computer. I removed the dead C drive from my main computer, and put it into an external USB case, and then connected it to the old backup computer to see if I could recover the data, which is pretty important, and that's an understatement. Anyway, my backup computer could "see" the old C drive was connected via USB, and it recognized the capacity, which was 2TB. However, in the disc-management program (Windows XP sp3), it showed the dead C drive as completely empty. Which of course, it isn't. Plus, when attempting to explore the dead drive, it slowed my system down to a crawl.
So here's my question: Is PhotoRec the right program to use? There are so many, it's impossible for a non-technical person like myself to know which data-recovery program will work best.
I have a very strong feeling that the drive is physically/mechanically OK, but that the file system, or "file table", or whatever it is called...was damaged, but all the data is still there....I think. (hope, actually)
I just bought a new 2TB hard drive to transfer all the data onto.
But, how do I proceed? PhotoRec says it can actually repair damaged file systems. So before I attempt transferring those files from the old C drive, should I first attempt to fix the file system?
I'm sure there is a recommended set of procedures for people in this situation, but I am not experienced in these things. If someone out there has some advice, I'd be very appreciative.
Thanks in advance for your help!
hopefully someone can give me some advice, I am not a very technical person.
My old computer system had some sort of voltage problem from the power supply, combined with something wrong with the video card, which ended up causing damage to the C drive. I suspect the causes of my hard drive problem are not as important as what happened....it killed my C drive. Couldn't boot up anymore.
So I switched to an old backup computer. I removed the dead C drive from my main computer, and put it into an external USB case, and then connected it to the old backup computer to see if I could recover the data, which is pretty important, and that's an understatement. Anyway, my backup computer could "see" the old C drive was connected via USB, and it recognized the capacity, which was 2TB. However, in the disc-management program (Windows XP sp3), it showed the dead C drive as completely empty. Which of course, it isn't. Plus, when attempting to explore the dead drive, it slowed my system down to a crawl.
So here's my question: Is PhotoRec the right program to use? There are so many, it's impossible for a non-technical person like myself to know which data-recovery program will work best.
I have a very strong feeling that the drive is physically/mechanically OK, but that the file system, or "file table", or whatever it is called...was damaged, but all the data is still there....I think. (hope, actually)
I just bought a new 2TB hard drive to transfer all the data onto.
But, how do I proceed? PhotoRec says it can actually repair damaged file systems. So before I attempt transferring those files from the old C drive, should I first attempt to fix the file system?
I'm sure there is a recommended set of procedures for people in this situation, but I am not experienced in these things. If someone out there has some advice, I'd be very appreciative.
Thanks in advance for your help!