Is my Data REALLY gone? :(

Discussion in 'Storage Devices' started by limeko, Jan 21, 2010.

  1. limeko

    limeko Geek Trainee

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    Hi all,
    So a few weeks ago my worst nightmare happened; my external hard-disk quit working after a power-drop and my data "vanished" from it. Now I'm really not technical, and kinda dumb :doh: because i didn't make proper backups - but a technical guy could recover the data. Now, I was totally happy that he could do it, but today, I got my new harddisk with the recovered data on it and everything is scrambled and like 90% of the files are not opening anymore. The worst thing is that my photos are not opening anymore, however, the file sizes are still big, so is there are way to still open them?

    Another weird thing; I plugged in my old hard disk (the crashed one) and it supposed to be 500GB. But if I look at the info, it says it has a capacity of 100GB?

    F.Y.I. I'm working on a mac and the crashed disk was a lacie box with seagate disk.

    help me :(
     
  2. valamar

    valamar Geek Trainee

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    Odds are the data is toast, and proper drive recovery is expensive several hundred to several thousand dollars i believe, and it offers no warranty of any kind.
     
  3. limeko

    limeko Geek Trainee

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    ok, but still I'm wondering how an external hard drive can go from 500 gb to only a 100?
     
  4. valamar

    valamar Geek Trainee

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    open a run prompt, then enter "diskmgmt.msc" and hit ok. you disk will probably be disk 1 (it may not be, this varies alot from system to system) and look at how big it is there.
    (it may have 1 partition at 100GB, and the rest is blank). beyond that, i dont know.

    **DISREGARD**
    i just noticed you said your on a mac, the above is for windows. you can try mounting it via command line, ive heard of that helping on similar errors on a mac, but i can't tell you the command.
     
  5. Dwarfer

    Dwarfer Guest

    clues in your description to what I think may be the problem, i would try using a different ide/sata cable, reporting bad hdd size and scrambled data
     
  6. Techtiger4

    Techtiger4 Geek Trainee

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    You should not be worrying at all. There are effective data recovery softwares available that are very much affordable to fit in one' pocket.., Go for Kernel for data recovery software and your data wil be saved.
     
  7. valamar

    valamar Geek Trainee

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    Techtiger4's soultion will work if the data has been erased or formatted, but if the drive has had a head failure, or one of the disk's has been damaged, or the head is bad, it will not help. if there is a PHYSICAL failure, such as the spindle or a headcrash, then no software solution will recover it.

    having said that, your problem could be due to a bad filesystem or similar problem, but that won't explain the HDD size, that one is beyond me.
     

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