hello everyone

i'm totally stoked that this forum exists and that there are friendly & knowledgeable people willing to take the time to help others ... thanks up front to all of you and the administrators of this forum ... now on to my issues

so i'm trying to recover from a hd crash ... thanks to resources such as this forum, i was able to burn a Bart PE boot disk ... i've been using check disk to try and recover data from my hd and so far it's been s l o w going ... just to give an idea of the pace, i'm @ 12% of verifying data (stage 4 of 5) and i've been just letting the app run day and night, restarting when my ram's used up, for a few weeks now ...

apparently at 12% i'm hitting a file that's pretty big, a few times already check disk has 'konked out' trying to replace the bad sectors in this file ... by this i mean multiple times, the system has either restarted itself or check disk has thrown up a message saying there's insufficient ram space to replace the bad clusters in file number such and such of name such and such and stopped running

1) is there a faster way i can go about attempting to recover my data?

2) is the "bad cluster replacing" occurring in check disk incremental? ... that is to say, is some progress made each time check disk hits this big file that is "carried over" to the next session? ... or is it possible that the available ram is insufficient for "fixing" this big file? ... will expanding my ram be effective in this situation with my computer in its current state?

i'm not completely computer illiterate, but i'm far from completely computer savvy ... i have basic knowledge of systems and even some limited coding background, but nothing professional ... i've burned a UBD4W, and although the disk was "fancier," i found the environment less stable ... subsequent boots have been problematic with my UBD4W ... in creating both the Bart PE & UBD4W i've had to work around Dell reg fixes ... again forums were EXTREMELY helpful in this regard ... i'm open to any and all avenues which could expedite this process for me ... Thanks very much for reading my post

IMO writing to a failed hd is a VERY bad thing to do and CHKDSK is doing exactly that.

You can increase the size of the PEBuilder RAMdisk to 96MB if you haven't already. You can replace it with an IMDISK plugin which allows even larger sizes.

If your BARTPE disk can read your hd I would recommend offloading your files to CDs or a USB stick before writing to the hd.

tks Ed

yes, i've read that writing to a damaged hard disk is a bad idea, this just goes to show how new at this i am ... i'm not sure that the data on my drive is readable ... i know that attempts to access the data through UBD4W and Bart PE have been unsuccesful, UBD4W showed my hd capacity as -1 gb and trying to access the drive thru the explorer was not possible ... will installing the BTS Driverpacks make the drive readable to Bart PE or UBD4W? ... my machine is a pedestrian Inspiron 1505, with i believe a 70 gb hd and a gig of ram ... after all, if the files were accessible, i could just offload the files i wanted to save, wipe the drive and re-install my OS ... do you have any suggestions for recovering my data if the drive is unreadable?

tks again for your time and attention Ed

Jello,
you need a crash course in data recovering.

If the damage to the filesystem is trivial, checkdisk can fix it allright.

If it is extensive you should STOP attempting accessing that drive and EXPECIALLY through a NT based system and "normal" tools.

Every second, minute, hour you do that, the more you LESSEN the chances of recovering anything.

You should get a (bigger) drive and image the failed drive.

Then work with recovery tools on the image.

Tools that you might need/want to use are:
TESTDISK and PHOTOREC:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I am guessing that your filesystem is NTFS and that the problem is in the MFT table, if this is the case, TESTDISK should be able to fix it:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Advanced_NT..._and_MFT_Repair

If you can spend some money on it, there are of course commercial softwares.

jaclaz

ty for your reply Jac

so my data recovery crash course has begun ... and i've dl'ed a copy of testdsk, tks very much for the links in your post, they've been very helpful ... here are some things i was wondering about:

1) will i be able to image my damaged drive if i can't read from it? ... as i said in my original post, i can "see" the drive 'sometimes' when i boot and obviously BartPE sees it when it's running checkdisk ... when i booted with UBD4W it saw the drive but showed it's capacity as -1, also it doesn't show up in Copy disk ... will this amount of access be sufficient to create an image?

2) will the drive have to be removed from my laptop and connected to another system to create the image and/or use testdisk?

i thought it'd be a good idea to share the conditions under which the drive failed ... file downloads were in progress and windows threw up a prompt indicating the drive was almost full ... in response to the prompt some files were deleted in order to free up space ... it was at this point that the system became unresponsive and the subsequent attempted reboot brought up windows dreaded blue screen along with the hex addresses of unreadable memory ... i realize this is cruel and unusual treatment of the drive but it's not possible for me to supervise all the sessions on all the computers in the house, so often times i'm just left to try to clean up the messes after they've been made ...