Help required

Hey guys,

Right, I had all of my music and stuff stored on a 320GB external HDD. I sold this and transferred all of the data onto a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB. This was in the system as D.

I unplugged the drive and left it back in it's box for a week. 10 Minutes ago I plugged it in, nothing in my computer, so I goes to drive management (like i did the first time) and it says unreadable.

So, question is, have I broken it? Is it a simple mistake, is it possible to get the data back? I can't think of doing anything wrong.

Thanks,

Peter.

Find something that can restore the partitions.

name='nunzio' said:

Find something that can restore the partitions.

Click to expand...

Any examples?

sorry forgot them.

http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

That is what I use/used in the past. But there are free ones out there.

I think Acronis do a tool for this?

Usually with a 15 day trail on their products too so if that available then bonus

name='lasher' said:

I think Acronis do a tool for this?

Usually with a 15 day trail on their products too so if that available then bonus

Click to expand...

Tried the acronis tool, apparently doesnt support the drive.

Somebody reccomended Restorer 2000, works but only 128k files, so cant get anything from the drive, all the files are on it though...

Anybody got a free alternative?

Hi there, TESTDISK is a DOS-based FREE utility that you can use to recover deleted/damaged partitions but it can be difficult if you don't have any idea about what you are doing.

When you're recovering lost partitions, it is not as simple as it sounds, you get a lot of "ghost" partitions, that were on the drive before. The idea is to not use destructive recovery methods right away (writing on the disk that you want to recover data from), use the "preview" mode and recover data by copying file by file to another HDD before attempting to do any actual partition recovering.

The only commercial utility that I used successfully is GetDataBack and I used quite a few when my Samsung drives decided to "drop" some partitions out of the blue. They were F1's and T166S's. Coincidence? Maybe. But I decided to stay away from Samsung drives and ATI's SB600-7x0 that week. Unfortunately it is a commercial software.

So you should try TESTDISK first, it's free but seems complicated, unless you do any writing operations that can damage the partitions even further, you won't damage anything. Use preview, if the file structure seems OK, then recover the partition in place. If you're not sure, don't do it, you could do more harm then good.

Edit 1: @ctive partition recovery software for me behaved strangely. It seemed to work, and it did with smaller files (<1GB) but with large files (>1GB) it only recovered the first 1GB of information, even if the file seemed to be OK. I had a few HD rips that were big files, and the movies were incomplete at playback. Just a warning. Maybe it will work for you, test it first.

Edit 2: I just found out about this software: PC Inspector File Recovery 4 that some sites out there report good things about. Check it out, it is free apparently.