Creation of image on damaged laptop drive

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Dennis888
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2010 4:37 pm

Creation of image on damaged laptop drive

Post by Dennis888 » Thu Apr 01, 2010 11:32 am

Hello,
I have a laptop drive Seagate Momentus 7200,200GB that I need to recover data from. When attached to desktop through ATI/atapi bridge system says disk must be formatted to utilize. I closed all dialog in regard to formatting and open R-Undelete. I can see the drive, and I right clicked on it and selected Create Image. I selected a byte by Byte image and continued. The image creation started and has been running for over three hours now. The progress indicator has not shown any additional progress since it indicated three quarters of the image had been created. Should I cancel the image creation,or just let it go? I could just try to restore data directly from the drive instead of from Image. Please let me know what you think.

Regards,
Dennis888

Alt
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Re: Creation of image on damaged laptop drive

Post by Alt » Thu Apr 01, 2010 2:51 pm

It looks like your hard drive has a hardware problem. See http://www.r-tt.com/File_Recovery_FAQ.shtml#q1 for more information.
In fact, you may recover files residing on the 3/4 of the drive if you use the incomplete non-compressed image.
If you think that your hard drive works normally, you may stop the image and try to create it once again. Though, I wouldn't overwrite the uncompleted image, just in case. If R-Undelete freezes again, contact our technical support with the problem.

Dennis888
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2010 4:37 pm

Re: Creation of image on damaged laptop drive

Post by Dennis888 » Sat Apr 03, 2010 12:03 pm

I decided to stop trying to recover data with R-Undelete as it was just making things worse. I could see the drive in My Computer when I first started the data recovery with R-Undelete, but after trying to create an Image I can no longer can see it in My Computer. When attached now the system ask to format the drive in order to utilize it. Additionally, disk was not making any sounds and SMART was not reporting anything unusual either.

My question is how does one determine when having a problem with drive not being recognized or data lost, if it is due to logical errors or malware; or if there is a physical problem with the drive. I like to know because I just made matter worse by trying to regain my data using R-Undelete.

Regards,
Dennis888

Alt
Site Moderator
Posts: 3129
Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 pm
Contact:

Re: Creation of image on damaged laptop drive

Post by Alt » Sat Apr 03, 2010 2:22 pm

At least, you can now regain files from 3/4 of the disk. The FAQ point lists some symptoms that a hard drive is dying:
Your system does not recognize the device anymore, or it appears under unusual name.
SMART inspecting programs report a severe hardware failure event.
The hard drive makes unusual noise, clicks, starts too slowly.
Bad blocks constantly appear on your hard drive.

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