Hello.
I have a question. I have suffered a great misfortune, whereby my main hard drive has been hotswapped (not by me, for the record.) and I was wondering:
1. Can I recover the data
2. Is the drive fried for good?
*hotswaps HDD*
Hello.
I have a question. I have suffered a great misfortune, whereby my main hard drive has been hotswapped (not by me, for the record.
1. Can I recover the data
2. Is the drive fried for good?
By hotswap, you mean someone yanked the IDE cable and/or plugged it in while the computer was on? Does the BIOS find the drive when you boot? If so, then there's always a chance to get data off it. Was it FAT32, NTFS, or what? That likely matters too; some filesystems are easier to recover than others.
Yeah, the IDE cable was inserted while the computer was on. The other problem is that the drive uses NTFS. I'm having a look at EnCase and the Forensic Toolkit suite, which are easily capable of restoring basically any file system, but it looks as though they're going to cost a fair bit.
The BIOS locates the drive when I attempt to boot, but I can't enter setup.
It looks as though the only utilities I can use are computer forensics stuff; none of the 'run of the mill' programs can handle anything other than FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32.
http://www.google.com/search?q=recover+ntfs+partition , have fun. I have no idea how to restore an NTFS partition. Find a program to do it, and pray.
Will do. Thanks a lot for your help.
I'd probably say download a free Knoppix/linux boot CD, recover what data you want/need off the NTFS drive (since reading NTFS in linux is no problem), then reformat it
As for not being able to enter the setup for BIOS, I doubt that's related to your HD issue. Perhaps you're pressing the wrong key to enter it, or if you've passworded it and lost the password, try looking in your motherboard's manual to see how to reset the BIOS and it's password.
*Points to Windows XP/NT/2000 CD*
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