JonesPC

Last week I told the story about a friend that lost a lot of important data in a harddrive crash. Well, we kept at it and used some software to get back some of his important files. To be honest, I thought all was lost. First I’ll go over what was tried originally. To make sure it was the harddrive and not the computer itself, I booted the PC using an Ubuntu live cd. If you have been living under a rock for the past year or so, Ubuntu is a pretty useful version of Linux that you can download and burn to a cd. You can then boot your PC using that CD and it will run the Ubuntu OS from the CD instead of whatever OS you have on your harddrive.

Ubuntu loaded up fine and everything was in working order. It couldn’t mount the bad harddrive though.

I then booted the PC using a Windows PE live CD, still couldn’t access the harddrive. Next I took the harddrive out and put it in a working PC as a second harddrive. Then all I kept getting was the message stating that the drive needs to be formatted. There are other things I tried, but it was pretty obvious that the drive was bad. Me personally, I would’ve just written it off and bought a new drive but he (check this story for more details) had some important files that he really was stressing the idea of loosing.

Finally, something worked.

A little piece of software called O&O Disc Recovery. Another friend had that software but never used it. We figured it was worth a try. So we installed the software on a working PC, then took the bad harddrive and installed it on the working PC as a second drive. Booted the PC and started the program. All of a sudden, a drive that was completely useless to us had a bunch of files on it that can be recovered. His main concern was about 1000 pictures he had of his kids that were the only copy of those pictures. So we went through the menus and selected "JPG" as the format that we wanted to look for and found just about all of his pictures. It was easy, but it wasn’t quick. Took about an hour and a half to go through the scanning process and another 20 minutes to transfer a little over a gig of pictures to the good harddrive (this was using a 2.8 ghz Pentium 4 PC with a gig of ram).

The software has about 280 file formats that you can select as files you want the program to recover. If a file format you were looking for wasn’t on the list, such as Tax Cut save files, I think you are still out of luck as I didn’t see it listed and didn’t see any way to add extensions to the list. Thats not to say it isn’t a way to add them, I just didn’t see it, so if it is, it isn’t too obvious.

The good thing (or bad thing) about O&O Disc Recovery is that it will scan the drive for files regardless of the last state the harddrive was in. That means deleted files that you may think are no longer on your computer (yes that porn you don’t want anyone to know you looked at) may show up. Ive never had to try to recover filed from a bad harddrive before, so I’m guessing that there may be some better software out there to do the job, but I can say Ive had some good luck with what I had.