Disk partitions dissipated -- Advice/Help?

[Matt L]

Got a mess. I rarely turn my computer off, but was on vacation for a week and decided to power down. when I returned I booted and system hung at Win 7 boot screen. Tried several different things and got to the point of dropping the WIn 7 disk in and attempting repair. No luck.

After much frustration I popped another Hd in the system and loaded a fresh version of Win 7. Added back my original drive and system ran very slow, but 4 the the secondary partitions were visible. C drive was unreadable. Tried to copy data from other partitions, but system took forever. A 6.5 GB file showed 22 hours to copy to the new disk. Tried downloading some file copy programs, got about the same results.

Out of frustration and to see if the disk was dead I ran the WD diagnostic on the drive a WD 640ZAAEX. It hung on the quick test, an hour later still no results. Perhaps a bad move but I rebooted. Loaded Linux Mint on a USB drive and tried to copy files using that but now all the partitions on the WD drive are missing. At this point I pulled the power to that drive and am looking for some way to recover. Have a partial backup but many files are not in that back up. It's weird, feel like a big chunk of my digital life is gone without warning. Short of spending hundreds of $$ with a file recovery company what can I do?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Short of spending hundreds of $$ with a file recovery company what can I do?

Learn to make backups.

Edit: Everybody has to learn the hard way, the first time. The question is, what will you do the second time?

 

[Matt L]

Yeah Sparky, cool suggestion.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Google "ddrescue". Buy a fresh new drive of the same size or larger. Clone the data sectors as best you can using ddrescue to the new drive. Then, try using file-recovery / partition-reconstruction software on the new drive. You will need a third drive to save your files to.

 

[Elixer]

As was mentioned, if you want to even attempt to recover anything, then you need to clone that drive to another drive.
Then use something like testdisk (free) to salvage what you can.

However, if you can't even access the HD anymore, then your only option is pony up the $$$ and let the pros deal with it, if you have data that is important on it.
If not, then you can do some tricks, but your odds are pretty low for it to work.
There is the freeze your HD trick, there is the swap the circuit board trick from a *identical* drive (same firmware and everything)...

 

[Matt L]

Funny, I just used Testdisk and checked the disk. reset the partitions to what they should be, but the C; partition is corrupt. Booted into Win 7 and nothing. Win does not see the drive.

booted into Linux Mint 64 bit and it sees the drive and all the partitions correctly. In the process of copying the files, but it is slow. one partition has 39G of files, copy is showing 45 hours. That is the smallest of the partitions. I'll have to explore what Acronis backed up to one of my other Hard Drives, I think that is most of the vital data, but getting the stuff off the problematic HD is primary.