Retrieving Harddisk Info from Laptop SATA HD

The HDD has a large number of unreadable blocks. If the data is important get it to a data recovery lab and be prepared to spend $500+.

You can't do proper recovery or diagnostics with a USB-attached device. They do protocol conversion. you'll need a native SATA or eSATA controller.  

A program called spinrite does a decent job  of getting what it can, and that program could run for days or well over a week.   But it is very stressful on the HDD and once you kick it off, you pretty much can write off any chance of professional recovery getting all or most of the data back.

I suggest taking it to a LOCAL data recovery firm that offers a free estimate.  Most major cities have such firms.  Then your friend may get a list of what is recoverable and what is not and can make a proper decision on whether it is worth the risk of a spinrite partial recovery.

What was the stop code for the BSOD?

> The drive requires 2x usb ports to function. I'm not sure if this info helps in any way.

Do you mean the popup message says it requires USB 2.0 ports?

What he means with the 2 ports is that one of the usb plugs for the cable provides extra power.

i found the easiest way to access the data was hooking the disk to another PC - directly to the sata cable
if that does not work -  try HDDRegenerator, it repaired many drives for me :
http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html      

to be complete, here's how i handle a bad drive  :
https://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Hard_Drives/A_3000-The-bad-hard-disk-problem.html

What type of info are you expecting to recover from this drive if you used Roll Back feature and overwritten the data and system?

he did not overwrite data, a system roll back to  last known good does not touch it, as i read his post

Hi all,

First of all sorry for the delay and thanks for all the comments.

Heres what It tried (along with hopefully all the answers you need)

1. I tried putting the SATA disc directly into a desktop I had as a secondary harddisk. The drive appearred, however, it appearred as an empty drive?? (i.e. 100gb free).

2. Nobus is correct I tried a system rollback to last known good but this caused the same issue.

3. I tried putting the HD back in the machine so I could provide as much detail as possible with whats going on with it. (after trying it in the tower).

The laptop booted up and I selected lauch windows start up repair utility.

I ge tthe 'windows is loading files...' which loads and then reboots the machine

Once rebooted I get the Samsung splash screen and the screen then go black? eventually a movable cursor appears and nothing seems to happens. Then I Get the BSOD witht the following stop message;

STOP: 0x00008086.

If i then reboot and select boot as normal, the windows loading loads and then it blue screens again. (BSOD is too quick to read now though).

Obviously I want to try all things that will not potentially break the drive to get the info back. So if anyone could let me know what the best next step would be that would be great.

rindi - regarding the partion live cd - I went to the link provided is this the program I require;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemrescuecd/?source=recommended

also once downloaded could you provide any insight into what to do with the software as I am frightened of doing anything to jepordise the data?

No, it's the Partedmagic LiveCD (the Link is included in my first comment).

post the minidump, find it in windows\minidumps, and attach here as file

In your initial post you gave enough information for me to confirm you lost data. At best all you did is repair broken boot loader, which might cover all of 0.001%of the HDD. So now you are still surprised that every data file, DLL, program, and configuration file, and all the services that are required to boot didn't magically fix themselves???

Sorry, I need to be more blunt.  Forget making this disk bootable.  You need to buy a replacement HDD, load a fresh copy of windows on it, then mount this HDD to that booted system and copy files from the broken windows to the one that now boots.

P.S. if this data is important, then you should just turn it off, and pay somebody to image the disk while they can and restore it for you.  I never commented about hardware health until now and root cause.  You certainly have unreadable blocks.  Your drive may be close to dying forever and giving 100% data loss.

If I was in your situation and data worth $1000+ , then just pay somebody to do everything, starting with assessing HDD health.  Maybe the disk won't survive even a cloning or getdataback which is VERY stressful on a HDD.

You do not know root cause.  It is unwise to use this drive until you confirm it has nothing to do with a HDD that may be in stress.

dlethe,

thanks for the comment

if i try to boot to safe mode command prompt then it appears to load the majority of the files before blue screening?

Is this a good sign that there are a large amount of 'readable' blocks?

Since you've already replaced the drive, I would suggest running TestDisk on it.

Here's a step-by-step guide... after choosing [ Intel ] Intel/PC partition and letting it run the first [ Analyse ] (SIC) pass, use the [ Backup ] option at the bottom, so you can return it to the state it's in right now if you try a repair that doesn't make things any better or even makes the problem worse.
Then continue on to the [ Quick Search ] and extra search for partitions created by vista.

Look, if this is a 143GB disk, then at most, you are reading 0.01% of the drive in order for it to boot.  Do the math.

as asked : post the minidump, find it in windows\minidumps, and attach here as file you can copy it with the disk hooked to a working pc, or when booted from a live cd

If the partition table got corrupted, they might not be able to access C:\Windows\minidump.
TestDisk can restore the partition table from the backup copy if that's what happened.

that's true, Darr, but it does not hurt to look for it

Hi guys,

first of all many thanks for all the replies on this. I really appreciate it.

Ok, as the machine will not boot at all I can't get the mini-dump from the disk.

I've created a boot disc for parted magic. and booted the machine using this.

Now from the command line I can't seemd to find command definitions so I can see if I can move to the c: and navigate?

also I have just noticed that I get the following message when it parted magic is loading i get the following message;

Mounting PMAGIC_2013_02_28.SQFS ... mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

You shouldn't need to do much via the command line. First try mounting the disk. The 2nd Icon in the taskbar, right next to the start button, is the "mount" utility. If you can mount the partitions of your PC's HD via that, you should then be able to browse them, copy the minidumps away, and maybe also the data you need. If you can't mount the partitions on that disk, you can try scanning it using testdisk as explained above, which is also on that CD.

Linux doesn't use drive letters like C: which m$ OS's use...

ok i assume it has a gui?

i select 'option 3. live with default settings 32' from the boot menu

is this correct?

also regaridng using testdisc.

I assume I will have to remove the disc, install into the tower again and then run the test disc program?

is this correct?

many thanks for all the help?

Yes, there is a GUI. If it doesn't load on that particular PC you probably have a further hardware problem on that PC. Run Memtest86+ which is included on that CD, and if your RAM has errors, replace the bad modules first.

Yes, connect the disk to another PC and boot the CD there, then first try mounting the partitions you want to recover from. If that doesn't help run testdisk from there, or install getdataback on that PC like I mentioned earlier, it is easier to use than testdisk, and if it can will preserve the directory structure and file-names when it finds the data so you can copy it off, which testdisk probably can't.

Rindi,

Many thanks.

If rebooted and left it to load and GUI has now appeared!

Ok. I opened the (sorry I am not familiar with Linux!) drive button on the taskbar at the bottom which loaded /media.

a mount-gtk appearred to the right of this with 4 drives in it

ATA SAMSUNG HM320JI (10 GIB) sda1
ATA SAMSUNG HM320JI (144GiB) sda2
ATA SAMSUNG HM320JI (143 GiB) sda3
TSSTcorp CDDVDW TS-L633L sr0

now i can click the mount button to the right of each and all change to unmount apart from sda3?

I assume this is the drive I am trying to access?

If I browse the others I cant see any typical information or folders I coul duse to find the docs I am after?

Any Ideas??

If I try to mount using the browser I get the error 'exit atatus 13' also

If you get this free CD and boot from it then you will have there File Transfer Wizard which will allow you to copy out all you want and modify boot options.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/rk-express/

>>  as the machine will not boot at all I can't get the mini-dump from the disk.  <<  sure you can - boot from a live cd, or hook this drive to a working PC to copy the dump

> I assume I will have to remove the disc, install into the
> tower again and then run the test disc program?

No. TestDisk can be run on the disk through a USB adapter, or however you're accessing it without booting from it. If the computer recognizes it as a hard drive (even if it can't read anything on it), TestDisk should be able to find it from its virtual linux environment, too.