Hello,
I’m a novice at disk recovery so have been trying to follow advice on forums such as this, but can’t get any further. Can any one advise me what to do or try next?
I have a Windows Vista desktop with a 160Gb boot disk and a WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Caviar Green 1TB storage disk (with one solo partition which was about two-thirds full). Shortly after new year, the WD storage disk failed: Windows recognised a disk in the Windows Explorer/Computer listings but I cannot access the disk, find any details or run a check disk. The boot start-up/setup (BIOS?) screens also detect the disk, showing the details and disk size. An early chkdsk run on the disk run from the command prompt was hanging while checking file segments: it started listing errors at around the 294,500 segment of 335,000 or so, and hang around the 299,000 point.
A more-technically minded friend suggested booting up in Ubuntu and looking at the disk that way, so I downloaded and burnt an Ubuntu 11.10 boot disk and booted the desktop from that. Through Ubuntu I could see the disk and it showed the correct “name” label I had given it, but I could not mount or look into the disk further. I was able to create an image of the disk onto a 1.5 TB external drive and some “foremost” audit runs on that image showed names of files that I recognise and expect, so clearly some data is still on the disk (probably most of it). However trying packages like P2 eXplorer, I can’t “mount” the image file enough to investigate it, getting “Can’t get disk info; media is write protected” errors. This seems odd as that external drive, the directory structure to the image file and the image file itself seems to have Full Control permissions to Everyone.
Any suggestions as what the fault maybe or how I can recover the data or disk myself? Additionally, does anyone know about this “media is write protected” issue?
Regards,
Graham
