My laptops HDD decided to take a E36 M3 while doing homework thur night. After running diagnostics I come up with the code "2000 0142, status byte 53"
Laptop starts, get a message "no bootable device found"
I've done everything I can think of;
swapped HDDs with another laptop, no dice.
Tried to reinstall windows (pretty sure that will format the HDD), no dice anyways. My recovery cds i made are apparently bad, also laptop states "no HD found" when I boot from CD and get to the splash screen
Tried an HDD enclosure via USB on another computer, drive shows up but only option is to format
currently trying to create a USB boot device if any of my USB drives will work
If I can't do a windows repair, what are my other options to recover the data? Geek Squad said they do OS recovery for 129, but again, I don't think that will save my data
I'm trying to do all this from my gf's old laptop (slower than molasses) and my old laptop (running an old ubuntu release and 2 windows partitions that won't boot up)
any suggestions?
If you've already formatted the drive in an attempt to reinstall (or when prompted to by Windows), you can pretty much say goodbye to the data - that would make it impossible to recover the filenames and directory structure or any fragmented files (which could be most of them).
If you don't want your old data back, just buy a new hard drive, if a re-format doesn't fix it, it's a hardware problem.
Sounds like the problem is either serious data corruption, possibly to the partition table (suggested by the fact that you're prompted to format when you put it in the enclosure) or a bad drive controller board (suggested by the Windows install disc saying "no hd found"). For the former there are DIY recovery methods, for the latter you have to take it to a data recovery company which would have a library of drive boards to choose from.
I've used a bootable "test" Ubuntu CD to get an operating system up (running off the CD), then use it to rescue my files. But if you've formatted it already, it's gone.
There are tools (such as photorec) you can use to recover any files that happen to not be fragmented from a drive that's been formatted or has some other kind of severe filesystem metadata damage, but you won't know what the file's name or location was. It could be useful for recovering things like pictures or movies.
SkinnyG wrote:
I've used a bootable "test" Ubuntu CD to get an operating system up (running off the CD), then use it to rescue my files. But if you've formatted it already, it's gone.
It's not really gone if you did just a standard wipe. But the tools to recover are astronomically expensive and belong to agencies with three letter acronyms.
For a normal user if you formatted the drive its a complete loss. Its even worse if windows came in and you stopped the format in process.
Figure $500 on up for someone to get your data back - if there's anything left to save - at this point.
wearymicrobe wrote:
It's not really gone if you did just a standard wipe. But the tools to recover are astronomically expensive and belong to agencies with three letter acronyms.
Hahaha no, not anymore. This was true for drives made in the 80s and earlier, but for modern-ish drives, a single wipe pass is enough to make whatever was there before irrecoverable.
But now SSDs are making a wipe pointless since when you try to wipe an SSD, you're basically shotgunning the wipe bits over empty space.
