Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

debwalton · Joined: 19 Feb 2009 Posts: 1 Location: San Antonio, Texas

i keep my work files on a physically separate internal harddrive, a 500 gig Western Digital SATA. At last check, i believe it had about 80 gigs of content. My C drive is ok, and i'm running XP Pro. Everything was fine one day, the next it said "corrupt directory" next it said "I/O error" another time it said "disk full" and then it would not let me access the disk at all. i would like to see my work files again, but have no idea how to get them back. i read about data recovery a little on this forum, it says i should make an image file first and do the recovering from the copy.

my question is, i guess, how do i make this image file? can someone point me to a place that says "step one: do this" etc, so that i (or more likely, some smart friend of mine) can try to fix this without the expensive datarecovery services that i can never afford? i could sure use a bit of advice. my harddrive isn't all that old, but it did go on a long, cross country trip recently from texas to california in the back of my ford explorer. it worked a few times after i got there, so i'm not sure if that was just a coincidence or what.

i had a lot of cool photoshop files on that drive, some websites i'd done in the past, and lots of other things i'd like to have back. any help would be greatly appreciated

DataHero · Joined: 11 Feb 2009 Posts: 30

Honestly there are so mnay steps I don't think anyone wants to give it to you step by step.

Best thing to do is get FTK imager and Get Data Back, you can probably get tutorials on You Tube for them both.

Here is a tutorial for Get Data Back, you will be able to figure out FTK imager easily. Just look at the tabs up the top and select "image". You can follow the steps from there but be sure not to select physical - RAW (dd). You don't even need to mount the image to recover from it. You can select the image in Get Data Back.

Check back here if you get stuck and I'll point you in the right direction.

Good Luck!

www.datahero.com.au