No excuses, no backup, but would like to recover HD data

1492 wrote:

Must have missed your earlier comment. Have you tried doing so recently? Assuming the failed drive in the video was just under a year old as he mentions when it was posted to YT? That makes the drive about four years old today. You don't think storage technology can change in that time?

Just did it with basically the same drive. 320 GB samsung 3.5" drive. Sure there were errors reading some of the files, but it was able to recover all of the lady's photos, which was the most important thing.

When it maps out bad sectors on the fly, it rights it into a table. This is not the firmware, but rather a small flash drive, if you will.

When it maps it out, it creates a re-direct to the original index. If you swap the boards, that re-direct is gone, so that file will effectively be gone or corrupted. Furthermore, the re-directs that are present on the donor board are still there and those re-directs can also create corrupted files by inserting a block that is out of place. Typically this is less than 3% of the drive as a whole and if the customer only has 1/2 the drive space used, then the chances of a corrupted file are cut down significantly to less than 1%

Now, with hybrid drives this gets thrown out the window. Essentially a hybrid drive is two drives made to look like one. Lose the electronics and the drive is scrap metal.

Give Ontrack's Easy Recovery Professional a try. I've recovered data files from badly damaged HDDs that could not be recognized by a computer. Takes a long time as it goes sector by sector, could take days, but it works.

ALL our data is stored at all times on one of two RAID devices. One has 4 hard drives and if one fails the other 3 still provide 100% of the data. The other RAID box has two hard drives and one mirrors the other so if one fails no data is lost.

We access these boxes using a wireless router and our working files are always on the RAID box. Only way to lose everything would be with a fire and that is why the second 2-disc mirror RAID is used to backup the primary one. The second one is kept with a neighbor.

Cloud storage is a fancy name for something that has been available for many years. Anyone with a free Gmail or Yahoo account has a gigabyte or more of free storage space on their servers. If nothing else backup key files like your wife's spreadsheet at the end of each working session. Even a $10 USB drive will hold 8 gigabytes of data or a thousand spreadsheets so no excuse for being careless.

I have been working with computers for the past 30 years and backing up data is something I always do in some way. Even with my working photo file I have two workstations (HP tower and Mac tower) that I use and both of them have mirrored data drives (separate from the boot drive) so I do not lose a minute of work if one of the drives fails.

The more valuable the data the more important it is to back it up frequently as a matter of course. Data recovery services charge $1500 or more and they do not guarantee what data they will be able to recover and you pay either way for them to try.

Tom_M wrote:

Install the new hard drive. Boot the computer using the recovery disk. You may have to manually select the boot device when powering the computer. This is typically done by pressing the F12 key during power-up. Then follow the prompts. This will install Windows on the new drive. Once Windows is installed you then install the drivers from the driver disk.

That is exactly what we needed to know in this situation of a recovery disk and a new empty deive to replace broken drive.

Found all sorts of text posts and videos, but nothing that said what you said very well.

At least a set of instructions could have come w/ the recovery disks from Dell, but I have strong suspicions as to why they do not provide it...

Edit: Somehow I missed the previous message. Good to hear you are up and running.

Unless you want to pursue recovering files from the old drive, you can toss it in the trash.

If you had made a backup of your computer you would most likely have done that to an external USB drive using software such as Acronis True Image. This is the USB drive that they are talking about.

Install the new hard drive. Boot the computer using the recovery disk. You may have to manually select the boot device when powering the computer. This is typically done by pressing the F12 key during power-up. Then follow the prompts. This will install Windows on the new drive. Once Windows is installed you then install the drivers from the driver disk.

All the videos on the Dell recovery disk for Win 8 seemed to have you making a backup USB or assumed the hard drive was already working. I could find nothing on steps to recover w/ a new blank HD.

So we just put the new HD in and booted the Recovery disk, and voilla, it knew what I needed, and within a few hours, 96 W8 updates were installed, and a lot of personal settings were back via the Windows Store account.

Today we will bring it up to Win 8.1 Update 1, load back all backed up documents, pics, music, apps, etc. Then make a USB backup of all this, which I assume will be able to boot itself in future if another HD crashes.
?

I sure want to thank all here. This has been so frustrating with so many sources we spoke w/ around town giving different opinions on what we were facing.

To the OP - I have used the product Zero Assumption Recovery on several bad hard drives, both my own and some relatives. It seems to be really good at recovering the files, as long as they have not been overwritten. Take a look at Zero Assumption Recovery web site

They have a try before you buy, and since this is a non destructive recovery, you can try it on the bad drive prior to buying it. To me it has been well worth the $60 for the full version.

BTW, the misinformation I referred to earlier was w/r a host of local computer places w/r how to proceed.

Two disks arrived today from Dell

1) Windows 8 Recovery media for windows 8 products
2) Drivers and utilities

I have the broken hard drive that computer will not recognize AND a new blank hard drive to replace it.

Could someone give me an idea of what I am doing?

I cannot find a video that addresses this entire situation.

How does the recovery disk make an entire OS?

One video says I need a dedicated USB (how big must it be?



Not clear on above 'backup image of OS, or how to proceed like when and how the new (and old, broken) hard drives come into picture.

I have not tried this product but today 7/23/2014 it is free

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/hddmechanic/

Check it out.. That and professional help is all i can suggest.

NOTE: Giveaway of the day is good TODAY ONLY.

TheBearAK wrote:


I must be awfully damn lucky then. I've recovered data on over a dozen hard drives in the past 10 years by swapping electronics. All of them have been the 3.5" drives, I've never had to do a 2.5" drive. I keep old hard drives just for this reason.

The Chip that was different on that video... it was simply a memory chip. Samsung switched from using ESMT memory to Samsung memory. Everything else on the board is the same.

Must have missed your earlier comment. Have you tried doing so recently? Assuming the failed drive in the video was just under a year old as he mentions when it was posted to YT? That makes the drive about four years old today. You don't think storage technology can change in that time?

TheBearAK wrote:

Could you imagine the manufacturing process that would go into testing every single drive and flashing a new calibration on each one of them? I call BS on that based on my own experience.
And, as long as the firmware is the same or newer, it works.

This does a better job of explaining what I'm referring to? Hopefully, you're good at soldering?


- If you were to buy two new identical hard drives and decided to exchange the printed circuit boards over to each other, the chances of the drives still functioning correctly is probably in the high 90's.

- But if you were to attempt this same procedure six months after normal operation, the chance of the drives working would drop to 5% and lower!

- The reason being that during a hard drive operation it will relocate sectors with degrading read times, this extends the life of a hard drive with automatic relocation of slow sectors. Unfortunately, this information alters firmware making the PCB unique to that drive, so it is imperative during PCB failure to physically remove this chip containing this unique firmware to a functioning matching PCB. In short, you can match the printed circuit board by model, family and country but firmware will need to be transferred and/or read and written to the new donor parts.

Source: www.harddrive-repair.com

So you're not likely to be able to just exchange the PCB board with the same(model) firmware or newer? If this info was erroneous, from a company that repairs hard drives for data recovery, then their business model must also be based on BS? Not likely as this is what I've also been told from other sources.

burlmart wrote:

This latest total loss of control of our W8 computer and the data stored thereon has been an eye-opener . I cannot tell you how much misinformation I have encountered in the past 4 days while trying to shake this problem down,

Actually, I think W8 does a good job in prompting users to complete recommended tasks, including making regular system image backups. My new DELL convertible also reminding me to make factory restore discs. Though I also have to believe that most users either ignore these suggestions or otherwise procrastinate, which can come back to haunt you.

If fact, my last HD failure years ago didn't catch me by surprise, as I had a monitoring app installed that warned me of problems 3-days prior to it completely failing. A new desktop HD just 10-days old.

But was prepared and had a complete cloned system drive already installed. So literally, just needed to re-boot my desktop PC, change the BIOS to recognize the new system boot drive, and was back up in about 5 minutes.

Notwithstanding, wish I had found that hard drive repair link above before writing this response, as it pretty much lays out the do's and don'ts for best practices for data recovery from HD failures.

And finally, be cautious of suggestions posted on sites like YouTube. I've come across totally erroneous instructional videos, which actually received high ratings and appeared legit, but were basically bogus info that I'm convinced was posted as a prank to see who would fall for them. That doesn't mean that some of these suggestions wouldn't work in the right circumstances. On the other hand, you also need to consider the consequences for doing so? Not to mention, the credibility of who actually is posting the info?

In any case, I don't think I can add anything else on the subject that hasn't been beaten to death. So, would agree with 1775 suggestions, including that it's time to move on? Good Luck!