Hard Drive Crash - Don't Panic!

I'm going to take a short break to get a little (more) geeky in this post and share something that might help prevent a few heart attacks.  If you've ever had to Google "data recovery", "unerase", "Raw file system", "missing partition", "drive wiped clean","all my data is gone", or "hard drive crashed" then you'll appreciate this.

Last night I was going to retrieve an old photo from an external hard drive only to find that the drive letter showed up, but nothing else.  It showed no data, no folders, nothing.  This is an XP machine and the disk is a 1.5 Terabyte Western Digital USB MyBook drive.  Looking at the properties of the drive I discovered the file system wasn't FAT32 or NTFS like I'd expected, but rather RAW. I figured this was a very bad sign.

This drive contains allot of content.  Some of that content is backups of material on other drives, so thankfully I still have the old stuff.  But the terrifying thing is that for the past several months I've used this drive to work on a number of projects.  The sheer size of these new cheaper drives just begs you to cram them full of video files, project files, graphics, photos and back-upped content from other drives.  The downside is once it goes you can lose a ton of work.  I admit that I've not been disciplined enough in backing up this drive.  Lesson learned.

So in a frenzied panic last night I started trying different recovery programs.  Many of these are try before you by - allowing you to see if the data can be found before you have to pay to use the program to recover it.  Others were freeware or donation based.  I wasn't too worried about the $30-$100 I would potentially spend as long as I could recover the files.  But the problem was, none of these programs could see the data.  Scans either didn't recognize the drive at all, or showed is as an completely empty RAW File System hard drive.  I tried Kernel for Windows Data Recovery, Easeus Partition Recovery, Easeus Data Recovery Wizard, MiniTool Power Data Recovery and finally Norton Disk Doctor.  Of all of these, Norton seemed to be the only one that could find data and put it into a form that allowed me to restore individual files.  The problem was there was no directory structure and the files were being named generically "recovered_video_file001.avi" etc.  This rendered the files essentially useless in a drive with about 18,000 individual files on it.   Still, Norton gave me some hope - there was data left on the drive and it could be recovered, at least partially.

Go to GetData to try Recover My Files for free.

Still not beaten I did some more searching and came across a great tool called Recover My Files by GetData.  The program recognized the RAW File System and after only a few minutes into a drive recovery scan I glanced over and saw the drive's directory tree and associated files.  The data is there and once the scan finished I was able to select the files and folders I wanted to recover and move them to another drive.  The program will not write to the drive being scanned to avoid accidentally overwriting any data.

When this screen populated with files and folders I regained years of my life.

One thing to note - a full scan of a huge hard drive can take hours or possible days.  You can however retrieve the data in manageable chunks by selecting which blocks to scan.  Recover My Files is well written and easy to use and most importantly, it works.  You can download the free trial here and evaluate what data can be recovered first without any obligation to purchase.  Hopefully it will save you some serious heartache.