Hard Drive Fail

[camsinny]

Ok, so, went on a family vacation to France recently. Had a great time and took lots of photos but didn't copy the photos off this external HDD I put them on while over there.

Turns out it's just a SATA drive so I've plugged it into my computer and the BIOS recognises it but windows refuses to realise it's plugged in.

What're my chances and what's my best option?

10x eBeers for everyone/anyone who can get my photos back.

 

[narf]

I take it the original external case including the USB/SATA adapter is broken? If not, just use that.

 

[camsinny]

Well when I used the enclosure the partitions kept disappearing out of explorer(and disk management) saying they need to be formatted.

 

[narf]

That's bad.

If you have a secondary PC available, plug it into that one.
Try booting a Linux live CD with the HDD plugged in, see if that can access the drive.

 

[camsinny]

I downloaded the ultimate boot cd last night and made a backup of the partition in question (just an image so if I fuck anything up I can always go back). Seems I can mount the 2nd partition that isn't important but it's partition 1 that's the problem.

Running Gparted and trying to check the volume spits this:

ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0)
ERROR(5): Opening "/dev/sdc1" as NTFS failed: Input/output error
NTFS is inconsistent. Run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot it TWICE!
The usage of the /f parameter is very IMPORTANT! No modification was
and will be made to NTFS by this software until it gets repaired.

Only problem is I CAN'T check it in windows as the drive doesn't stay visible for long enough.


###EDIT###

I fucking love Linux now. I remember about 3 years ago when I was playing around with different OSes and had a go at linux and hated it. Now if only Max worked natively in Linux I might consider making it my primary OS.

PhotoRec off the UBCD managed to recover something like 70000 files from the 60gb partition for me. About to sift through it all and make sure most of my photos are there.

 

[Goondu86]

Linux is a love hate thing, when it works it's all rainbow and roses, when it doesn't you fucking kick your computer hahaha. I handle Solaris 10 servers at work which are like 10 times worse.

 

[narf]

Linux is a love hate thing, when it works it's all rainbow and roses, when it doesn't you fucking kick your computer hahaha.

Great thing about Linux, when something does not work you can actually do something about it without reinstalling your whole operating system and every program you had installed.

 

[PacketCollision]

Yeah, I actually don't find myself kicking the computer when it breaks, unlike with Windows, because with Linux, I know exactly what broke and can usually get it fixed by poking around on the command-line for 15 minutes. Much better than the old "something's wrong, reinstall" routine from my Windows days.