Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

aaron_us96 · Joined: 06 Feb 2007 Posts: 5 Location: USA

I have a bit of a dilemma and was hoping some of you guys could maybe help me out. I am switching a hard drive out on a laptop that I have determined to be faulty. I was able to backup the needed data onto a usb thumb drive, but the usb port is on the back of the computer, so when I lifted the computer to look for something under it, I forgot about the drive and bent it a little. Now, whenever it is put into any computer, it shows up, but the system says it is inaccessible and asks if I would like to format it. That data seems to be lost, so I turned to the old hard drive.

I put the drive into a usb-to-ide external enclosure and tried to access it from another computer, but windows says that the device has malfunctioned and the data cannot be accessed. So, I put it back into the original laptop, and went into the emergency console from the XP boot disk.

I then tried to fix the MBR, thinking that might have something to do with it, because the drive wouldn't boot into XP when placed back in the original laptop. I typed in "fixboot c:" which completed successfully, then typed in "fixmbr" which completed successfully, but when I put "bootcfg /rebuild" it gives an error and won't perform that step. If I look up the directories in the emergency console, it shows modified dates and folder sizes, but instead of the usual "Documents and Settings" and "Program Files", etc, each folder has a jumble of weird symbols like a heart, some letters, an "i" but instead of a dot, it's an apostrophe, among numerous others.

Has all data been lost? Something is obviously still there, but this is beyond me.

kevin_476 · Joined: 07 Feb 2007 Posts: 5

Hi,
It looks like you've lost your data. Last time I met such problem, I almost lost my data when I first connected my CD writer. I got disk boot failure again and again. I tried best possible ways not to format the drive and to recover the OS missing functionality but everything failed and finally I had to format the drive. I thought I’ve lost my data but one of my friends surprised me by recovering the data. He told me he recovered the data with the help of a data recovery software called SalvageRecovery for Windows by SAlvageData Recovery Lab Inc. He purchased it online sometime back.
After the scan was completed, the lost files were in the list and I saved my data. Thanks to my buddy. But, scanning should be done ASAP to maximize the data recovery. What operating system you are using now? If you are using Linux then don’t worry caz it has software for Linux OS also. I wish you may get your data back.