Recovering data from a laptop HDD

[Xander]

Recovery complete. The hard drive is dying.

I got all of the .jpeg files off of the machine with easeUS by running it twice due to the 1GB limitation.

I then formatted it and tried to reload vista, but it was acting rather wonky. Running a disk check took hours and made no difference.

Called it a bad drive.

Once you've imaged the drive, you should be checking SMART data and running diags on the drive. If the drive is at all suspect, you shouldn't be trying to put Windows back on it. If you do (like you've done), you've wasted time.

 

[brandonkick]

I've found SMART isn't worth a damn.

When repairing megatouch machines for my uncle, I've found countless drives that SMART thinks are good but turns out that in fact they are not good.

You are right, I did waste about four min worth of my time reloading vista.


The lady did end up paying me $25, which I thought was fine. Never "sold" her this service to begin with, just offered to help her out when some other authority told her the drive was dead and the data unrecoverable.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I then formatted it and tried to reload vista, but it was acting rather wonky. Running a disk check took hours and made no difference.

Called it a bad drive. The only bad thing about the recovery is that it took a ton of picture files that were crap like cached files from the internet and so on. They have to sift through a few thousand pics to get the ones they want, but hey it's better then nothing.

If a drive goes belly up....I won't even waste a second of my time formatting and trying to reinstall on it. Unless that drive is a month or two old, and you know for a fact that it is simply software corruption on it due to something like a bad power supply that caused the computer to rudely shut off a few dozen times....toss the drive, and use a brand new one to install Windows on.

I have wasted far too much of my time running (and believing ) hard drive test utilities. I've seen them call good drives bad, and call bad drives good. A HDD is a cheap item, you can purchase 2 of them for the cost of 1 hour of my time. Failing drive on a clients rig, new HDD gets put in, clean install on a known good drive. Client gets a computer back with a known new good HDD that is faster than the old drive, so client is happier at the end of the day...for not much more money.