Hello everyone!
I’ve got the above drive from a client.
This drive for some reason wasn’t saving her data or she was unable to get it off. Either way she sent it to GeekSquad to get it off and they did nothing more but create a 16GB partition on the thing… but that is ALL the space that is shown… 16GB and not 200GB.
So I was wanting to know if there was firmware that I could do to re-write it to hopefully bring this thing back.
I would just send it in under warranty however the warranty was out 10.03.2010… she gave it to me the other day so I never had a chance to get it RMA’d… 
I’d hate to throw the thing away if this could fix it. Still spins fine… at least enough for me to run some data recovery software to get her pictures for her.
Thank you and God bless,
Johnathan
You could repartition the thing and format with a quick format. Then try some data recovery software. I think this may be beyond the abilities of UNDELETE. I haven’t looked but I am sure that a search will find some software out there.
Edit: you got me interested, and I found a post listing 10 top free data recovery tools
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/01/24/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/
1 Like
Thanks very much for that link.
Here are a few more:
TestDisk:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
“Tool to check and undelete partition (FAT, NTFS, EXT2/EXT3, ReiserFS, BFS) under Dos, Win9x, Linux, BSD. [GNU Public License]”
Photorec:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec
“PhotoRec is a data recovery software tool designed to recover lost files from digital camera memory (CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, USB flash drives etc.), hard disks and CD-ROMs. It recovers most common photo formats, including JPEG, and also recovers audio files including MP3, document formats such as Microsoft Office, PDF and HTML, and archive formats including ZIP.”
EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard 4.3.6:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/EASEUS_Data_Recovery_Wizard_d6336.htm
ddrescue (for cloning damaged file systems):
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
Could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft’s Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip
Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine it.
