Hard drive disaster fixed thanks to opensource utility

[SJP]

I really don't want this to sound like a sales pitch, but I'm forwarding on info about this utility because, well, dang, it was helpful.

So, we had a power outage at my home while my desktop was in sleep mode.  After the power came back on, I turned it back on from sleep mode (yeah, it was a little weird that that happened, since it's not on a battery backup), and everything seemed to be where I left it.  I left the room and came back...

Windows 10 frowny face of death.  And my computer refused to restart.

This was not good for two reasons: one, I need that computer in working condition to do video/audio editing, plus we had all our photos on there (Google Drive backups up a few of them, but not all).  Thankfully, in my many years of using PCs and knowing what can happen, my system actually has three hard drives on it...my Windows drive, my utilities/data drive, and a drive I use to stick things I'm not currently working on.  I bought a new backup drive, some external HD cases, and tried to use my laptop PC to 'hub' my files over to the backup drive so I could reinstall Windows clean and get back up and running.

Well, the C drive said it had problems, and refused to open.  OK, that was the Windows drive, it should be expected it wouldn't run properly.  Understandable.  My data drive copied without a hitch (even though the thing asked me 30 times if I wanted to copy certain files, not sure why), but then I came to my drive with my older stuff.

Windows refused to look at it.  This was shocking, because as far as I knew, there was no reason for this drive to have failed, and quite frankly, two hard drives being inaccessible at the same time was rare.  While the data drive had stuff on it our family didn't want to lose, this had stuff that was important to me, and it was not good that I couldn't back it up.

I looked around for answers, but the best answer I got was that Windows didn't want to look at the drive because it was listed as Dynamic under Disk Management, and Windows hates those for some weird reason.  I could change it to basic and Windows would read it, but it would...well, erase the drive, which is exactly what I didn't want.

Then some guy mentioned something called TestDisk on his blog.  Figured it was worth a try.

If you are ever concerned about being able to recover data from a drive, this is what you need.  This was able to look at that drive, see the partition was perfectly fine (i.e., it wasn't damaged), and because it could bypass the Windows-related dynamic drive nonsense, I was able to highlight all my files and copy them (again, using a laptop to act as a hub to copy the info to my backup drive), and I'm even able to look at my C drive and see what the issue might be (turns out it might be a partitioning size issue, where the drive is reporting it is twice as big as it actually is), but the files are apparently still there and should be recoverable, if I try hard enough.

I'm not sure how well you'd be able to get stuff recovered if the drives actually had failed (I have to count myself very lucky, all things considered), but considering I thought I had lost nearly everything earlier this week, this thing is amazing.

You do have to be comfortable using DOS-level software to use it, as it is all done from a Command Line Prompt interface and some of the menus are a little obtuse, but it is all menu based and doesn't require any typing or tagging to work.

I still have some work to do to get my machine back up and running the way it is supposed to, but I highly recommend it if you think you might be able to recover lost data before sending it off to a shop.  But for now, a lot of my old One Man Band files are safe, and that's what's important at the moment.

[ihavemyreasons]

Not quite the same thing, but I had a USB drive that I was storing a whole hell of a lot of work files on that failed a year or so ago. After trying several free programs that claimed they could recover lost USB drive files and failing to recover them, I paid for a program from a company called Easeus that recovered 90+% of the files that were on the USB. Downside was that it didn't recover the names of the files (it named them all 1, 2 ,3 , etc) and it recovered  old versions that had had been overwritten by new versions (as well as the newer versions), but the couple of days I had to spend deleting old versions and renaming files was a lot less work than totally recreating a couple of years worth of work from scratch.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Failed USB thumb drives have happened to a few people at work, they are not the most robust devices, and they get zapped by static all the time while being handled.

So, Always make backups of your thumb drives if you keep stuff on them you can't afford to lose.