Hey guys, here we have a desktop hard drive I have it here in an external case. This is from a unit that a customer came in this morning urgent that his computer was not starting and all his data is on this drive here.

So we are doing a hard drive recovery. He’s got a new unit so we didn’t really need fixing the computer just…It was going to be a simple data transfer but as you guys know nothing is really simple. So we put in an external drive and this is what we get. You don’t want to see this when you want to try recover a hard drive and you put in an external drive like this.

Basically Windows is saying do you want to reformat this drive. Not good news and if you look here in disk management there is the drive right there. It’s 160 it only shows up as 150 and it shows raw meaning Windows is not recognizing any type of format on it. This is not good news for this customer, so here we are going to do a couple things and try recover it,

I am going to do some follow up videos so you would see basically how it’s done even though I don’t attempt to try this by yourself because if things go wrong for you there is not going to be a way to get your stuff back. But I will do a quick follow up. One of the things that I did here as well is to give a little heads up.  You’ve seen some videos where we use the HD Sentinel.

It actually gives a performance number for the hard drive and the life and if you look at it right here that gives you an idea of what’s going on with that drive. There’s a 10% life so pretty much is dying. What we’re going to do is first we are going to try to make a clone of the drive.

The reason for that is going to be is if in recovery things go bad. At least we would have a copy of the bad drive. That sounds kind of a redundant but it’s better to have the bad copy of the drive than no copy of the drive. So that’s what we are going to go with. We are going to make an image of the drive and then we are going to into recovery so. I’ll follow up in another video. Actually, let me give you a couple seconds, this is the breakdown with the HD Sentinel software this is actually free you can get online.

And it gives you here some of the information about the drive or it did…it’s gone now. But basically if you saw it really quick there, it showed you the life of the drive, it showed you how many bad sectors so basically like a ford fort of what’s going on with the drive. Catch you in a few minutes.

Hey guys. Here we are back we did the hard drive image what we’re using over here is a tool called FDK Imager. You can see that there…FDK Imager. And so we ran the image of it. It took if you can see here the results a little over 2 hours and shows there some bad sectors found. But basically the software kind of just runs through and you know skips the bad sectors and just go through and tries to finish it off.

So it did finish, it verifies the image over here and so the image is verified so what we are going to do I’m going to put this on another software to actually do the recovery. The actual physical drive, we have an image of it and then we are going to work on recovering on the actual hard drive itself. So I will show you how that goes in a little bit.

Hey guys, I wanted to give a little bit more details here on this file here which is the report. So when we look here at the bottom we are going to see attention the following sectors could not be read. Do a drop back so you can see that so if you go through,

I mean there is quite a few sectors that are read. So what this does it just skips over that and just writes whatever it can. As you can see its pretty long. Many image software you know cloning programs. Most of them will run into an error and basically stop so this will just continue right through. That’s one of the reasons we this right here. Just wanted show you that detail of what that shows there. Let’s go up so you can see that again, this is basically like a summary report or log I should say so you can see that right there. Catch you in a bit.

Hey guys, here we are doing a follow up. Here I am on another computer right now this is the same hard drive. We are doing the recovery now and a lot of software out there .I have several different ones that I use this is my pretty go to. It usually does the job if I have any issues then. I will go to somewhere else.  I use another software. But this is pretty good it’s a paid software. It’s called Recover My Files, you can see it there.

So we put it in here. We start to do recovery and as you can see you know it’s a good sign. It’s running through, it’s finding files regardless of the condition it is in it in raw.  If we take a look here. I’m going to hopefully. Let me see if it’s going to give me…This sometimes takes 4, 6, 8, 10 hours. Until this is run overnight.

So it starts giving a little structure things that it finds kind of just wanted to show you that. In this case it probably going to stay, it will probably keep the folders and stuff intact…exactly. So if we look at this it looks like a pretty intact folder that’s Windows XP so that’s why you don’t see a user folder, you see the documents and setting. If you mess around with this anymore only to screw around with it while it is actually you know processing.

So for now everything looks good. I mean this is going to take awhile. I’m going to leave it here overnight hopefully we’ll come back in the morning. This will be done and then from there this will actually read and this is the actual recovery phase. Where it just transfers everything that it did find. We are going to put that into an external drive for the customer. So just wanted to show you that recover my files. That’s the menu and that’s the hard drive we’re working on. Thanks for watching.

Hey welcome back everybody, this recovery is finished. We left it overnight so here we are the next morning and this is kind of the results. This hard drive was fairly intact those files. So basically we are going to go here. This root is primarily the structure that was on there. It’s on there and then it goes into these other recovered files. Which could be you know deleted folders and things like that from the past.

So we are going to go straight here to this root.  We’re going to grab here the documents and settings. Remember that this is Windows XP so pictures and all that kind of stuff is actually in there. We are just going to grab a couple of others just miscellaneous. In case there is something in there. There is like a user folder in there. So we are going to go through that if we looked on here. We can see how much data is there. So we got about 22 GB and we are just going to go export this to an external hard drive. Hopefully we should be good to go. So I’ll show you the final result in a few minutes.

Hey guys, so here we are back, this is the final outcome of all the recovery. If we take a look here we got the external drive that we put everything to. These are the files that we chose and picked out to recover. So in the end it all seems like a pretty simple process. If you know what you’re doing and if you got the right tools. So that’s it, thanks for watching.

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