Hard drive recovery/reformatting

[JesseM]

Two of my friends' computers broke and I am trying to recover the data from their old HDs. Both HDs had Windows XP (one was German XP and the other was US English) and I tried putting them in my computers to see if they worked. After some fiddling around in the BIOS and the boot sequence I started up XP from my HD with one of the two other HDs. They showed up as D:/ but said they needed reformatting.

I understand there are programs out there that can possibly recover the data on these HDs so I can reformat them without losing all these files. My questions to you guys are:

1) What programs are there (if any) that could recover this data?

2) Is there any other way I can access this data? I thought that with the same OS the disks wouldn't need reformatting but I was apparently wrong, or something else is the case.

Thank you for your help!

Oh and another thing - I don't think the HDs are broken or anything because one of my friend's computers worked before I took the HD out (I was putting in a bigger one along with some RAM and a new graphics card), I think it would be too big of a coincedence for it to magically stop working like that, but I could be wrong.

 

[ambivolent]

did you try setting the jumpers to slave and running it as a slave, thats how i usually transfer data off of an old HDD

 

[JesseM]

I feel stupid asking this, but how do I set the jumpers to slave? They are IDE drives.

 

[ambivolent]

heres a pic of where the jumpers are located, there should be a diagram on the hard drive telling you which one to put the jumper on to set it as a slave

 

[JesseM]

Well I tried setting the hard drives to slave but it still says they need to be formatted. Any ideas?

 

[Rick]

If you can view the drivers in a Windows environment, try restoring the partitions using PCinspector.. It's a freeware program that seems pretty well put together, although I haven't had the opportunity to utilize it much.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

 

[JesseM]

I got a program called "PartitionMagic" and it says that the HDs do not have a NTFS file system present, so it is unable to restore the partitions. I don't think PCinspector would be able to help much more either.

Also, even when I switch the HDs to "slave" it shows up as "Local Disk" on my computer. Am I missing something?

If I were to reformat the drives would I lose all the data? I thought they would be completely wiped, but this website I was reading said that reformatting the drives only erases the data tables, not the actual data.

 

[ambivolent]

i dont know i always write my drives to zero, any it should be showing up as local disk,i have 3 seprate HDD's listed as local disk

 

[Rick]

I got a program called "PartitionMagic" and it says that the HDs do not have a NTFS file system present, so it is unable to restore the partitions. I don't think PCinspector would be able to help much more either.

PCinspector scans your drives for partitions. It can find and restore deleted partitions / file systems that Windows and Partition Magic haven't a clue to deal with...

Here's more information on how partition recovery actually works.
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/art-partition-recovery.htm

I cannot vouch with how well the program works, but payware programs I regularly use are very successful such as Active @ Partition Recovery and Acronis Disk Director.

 

[JesseM]

Thanks for your help, I'm now going to try to use a freeware prog called TestDisk to recover the data from the unformatted disk. I'm still not sure about the slave situation, but I guess I'll see what happens.

THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH. I now have all the data from the HDs and I'm now going to reformat and reinstall windows on them. I ended up using a really cool freeware program called TestDisk and I highly recommend it, although it would be pretty confusing for the average computer user.