necrophyte
Baseband Member
- Messages
- 51
my toshiba mk8025gas 80gb notebook (winxp sp3) disk seems to have suffered some serious damage some days ago. i actually only placed my notebook from one desk to another and then restarted it when it suddenly didnt boot windows anymore, neither in safe mode. it either freezed or said the ntfs.sys file was corrupt. i replaced it using the recovery console but no change.
first try using chkdsk /r on the first (of two) partitions (the one the OS is installed on) stopped at 75% saying the disk had unrecoverable problems. after some retries it actually finished chkdsk /r saying it repaired some errors. still, windows was unable to boot. so i took the disk out and placed it into an external usb-case. copying my documents and all the important files & folders from the first partition to another (healthy) drive went perfectly.
the second partition - the bigger one with the really important data - however, makes me mad. chkdsk /r and norton disk doctor both say
"The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 376 of name .
An unspecified error occurred."
the drive has a total capacity of 54GB, 12GB free (unfortunately i already deleted 2 folders containing about 4GB in order to freemore space and possibly help chkdsk/disk doctor to replace those bad clusters, not thinking about possible further corruption caused by that stupid action..).
surprisingly i managed to copy my whole music folder (29GB) perfectly, without any problems from that partition. BUT there are some 4-6 folders left, 2 of them are really extremely important to me (about 6GB), mainly containing photos and videos which i havent backed up or stored anywhere else, which cannot be copied completely. every time i try to copy them, while trying to copy certain files (every time the same ones), it says they were corrupt, or it were an invalid ms-dos function, or cannot read from source file or disk. i managed to copy those folders using a tool that enables skipping those uncopiable files while copying all the good ones, and the result were 131 files (jpg) out of a total of 2092 from the first important photo-folder not being copied, and 1040 files (mainly jpg, also some bmp, gif, mov, mp4 & mpg) out of a total of 5261 from the second important folder not being copied. also some files have been copied but incorrectly, eg. a picture covered to a certain amount with grey (probably incorrect chkdsk recovering or simply damaged file data).
when viewing those files in the explorer it takes quite long to show the previews when having the thumbnail view on, but after some time almost all pictures get a preview - thats one of the reasons why some actually "good" files havent been copied - ill try copying them seperately after their thumbnail preview has been shown.
any idea how to recover as much as possible of those files? its really very important to me since theyre mostly quite old private family photos etc. which would be lost for ever if not rescued now. i cannot say whether the damage is a physical one or just affecting the file system, but probably both, although theres no strange noise or so while the drive is operating.
would deleting the successfully copied 29GB of music and so freeing a lot of space help chkdsk or norton disk doctor with recovering the remaining ones? i also tried the included checking tool in norton partition magic which told me that there were several cross-linked files and other errors, so im not sure whether to risk deleting such a big amount of data since there also could be references to those files i want to recover, am i right?
a good friend of my dad owns a quite big software/hardware development, retail and service company - does someone know whether the hardware professionals there would be able to read out the whole data physically in their lab? maybe copying the resulting image to a healthy big drive and trying to correct the file system could be successful?
or any other ideas?
im really severely hurt by the fact that all those photos seem to be gone now so id do anything possible to get them back..
thanks
first try using chkdsk /r on the first (of two) partitions (the one the OS is installed on) stopped at 75% saying the disk had unrecoverable problems. after some retries it actually finished chkdsk /r saying it repaired some errors. still, windows was unable to boot. so i took the disk out and placed it into an external usb-case. copying my documents and all the important files & folders from the first partition to another (healthy) drive went perfectly.
the second partition - the bigger one with the really important data - however, makes me mad. chkdsk /r and norton disk doctor both say
"The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 376 of name .
An unspecified error occurred."
the drive has a total capacity of 54GB, 12GB free (unfortunately i already deleted 2 folders containing about 4GB in order to freemore space and possibly help chkdsk/disk doctor to replace those bad clusters, not thinking about possible further corruption caused by that stupid action..).
surprisingly i managed to copy my whole music folder (29GB) perfectly, without any problems from that partition. BUT there are some 4-6 folders left, 2 of them are really extremely important to me (about 6GB), mainly containing photos and videos which i havent backed up or stored anywhere else, which cannot be copied completely. every time i try to copy them, while trying to copy certain files (every time the same ones), it says they were corrupt, or it were an invalid ms-dos function, or cannot read from source file or disk. i managed to copy those folders using a tool that enables skipping those uncopiable files while copying all the good ones, and the result were 131 files (jpg) out of a total of 2092 from the first important photo-folder not being copied, and 1040 files (mainly jpg, also some bmp, gif, mov, mp4 & mpg) out of a total of 5261 from the second important folder not being copied. also some files have been copied but incorrectly, eg. a picture covered to a certain amount with grey (probably incorrect chkdsk recovering or simply damaged file data).
when viewing those files in the explorer it takes quite long to show the previews when having the thumbnail view on, but after some time almost all pictures get a preview - thats one of the reasons why some actually "good" files havent been copied - ill try copying them seperately after their thumbnail preview has been shown.
any idea how to recover as much as possible of those files? its really very important to me since theyre mostly quite old private family photos etc. which would be lost for ever if not rescued now. i cannot say whether the damage is a physical one or just affecting the file system, but probably both, although theres no strange noise or so while the drive is operating.
would deleting the successfully copied 29GB of music and so freeing a lot of space help chkdsk or norton disk doctor with recovering the remaining ones? i also tried the included checking tool in norton partition magic which told me that there were several cross-linked files and other errors, so im not sure whether to risk deleting such a big amount of data since there also could be references to those files i want to recover, am i right?
a good friend of my dad owns a quite big software/hardware development, retail and service company - does someone know whether the hardware professionals there would be able to read out the whole data physically in their lab? maybe copying the resulting image to a healthy big drive and trying to correct the file system could be successful?
or any other ideas?
im really severely hurt by the fact that all those photos seem to be gone now so id do anything possible to get them back..
thanks
)
