Help! Getting I/O errors scanning hard drive with GetDataBack

[thebamafan]

Howdy,
My laptop's hard drive stopped bootingthis past week. Initially I was able to access the drive using a USB boot drive using Linux. This worked once and I planned on doing it again to get my files off of it. However, it never worked again and linux disk utilities said there were read errors on the drive. Based on what I have read in posts on this forum, I downloaded Active@ Partition Recovery for Windows hoping that a corrupt MBR was the reason I couldn't boot. I tried scanning the hard drive, but after an hour it had only done 40MBs on a 111GB drive. I looked online and found that it was very possible that A@PR couldn't help me, so I downloaded GetDataBack for NTFS. When I try scanning the hard drive with GDB I get the following:

I/O Error 'Unknown error (23)' reading sector 0 on HD130:.

It asks if I want to continue. I said yes the first couple of times and then finally said Yes to All because the warning would not go away. I checked help and found that this was an unrecoverable read error. I let the scan continue for about an hour, but it was conituously listing Error 23 in the log. I stopped the scan because of the long list of errors and the fact that it still had 19 hours to go.

I am getting the impression that these tools are not going to help me. Does anybody have suggestions about what I can try next to recover files on this drive. I'll do anything short of sending this to a recovery service... unless you know one that is really cheap.

Thanks for the help,
Carey

 

[COLGeek]

You are describing a HDD that has physical issues that sounds like no software application is going to solve for you. Sorry.

A data recovery service may be your only hope.

When you connect via USB to a Linux box now, what happens? If the HDD is readable, you should be able to mount and then locate your files for copying. The inability to do that is confirmation that the HDD is toast (that is what the apps are indicating as well).

I assume you are using a Windows based system. If so, you can try recuva to see if it can recover anything for you:
http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Good luck!

 

[thebamafan]

Thanks for the suggestion, COLGeek. I just tried Recuva, but it doesn't even have the drive listed to allow it to be scanned. Active @ Partition Recovery and GetDataBack can at least see the drive.

Any other suggestions?

 

[COLGeek]

Sorry, but I think you are at the point where no app is going to help overcome the physical issue with the HDD.

 

[SymTec]

I would let the get data back run for the 24 hours or however long it will take, I'm guessing your are not going to get a full recovery of the information but hopefully that will give you something.

next option is sending it in $750 minimum charge for someone like data savers,

good luck

SymTec

http://www.symtec.com