The Glade 4.0

I have an older gaming system (4 years old or so) that I have been using as a HTPC sort of thing. There is nothing critical on it, but there are a few things I'd like to recover.

I usually leave the thing on 24x7 and only reboot for updates and such.

I got up this morning and found the system at a 'Insert Bootable Disk' prompt. I hadn't performed any recent installs or updates.

After trying to reboot it, and even attempting to recover using a Win 7 boot disk, I'm pretty sure the boot disk is failing. It will occasionally start to boot windows, but eventually just hangs... sometimes it wont even recognize the boot disk.

The boot drive is a striped raid0 using onboard hardware, so I can't pull the hard drive out and attach it to another computer. And I'm not trying to restore the sytsem to working condition. I just want to access the data on it to pull anything useful or important off.

I'm trying to minimize disk activity (i.e not trying a restore point, etc...), so as not to cause futher damage.

My hope is to find a liveCD or some kind of bootable USB drive image that has some data recovery tools on it.

Anyone have any suggestions?

you could throw the drive in the freezer (in a tightly sealed bag.)

I've had a surprising amount of luck with that work around to retrieve data off a failing drive.

BartPE works for a lot of people. At work I use a PE that can be loaded via cd or USB and has full disk recovery tools.

There's also MHDD, that can often repair damaged drives to make them bootable, when chkdisk won't. that's freeware, but it preforms a activity-intensive disk scan. (kinda like chkdisk on crack)

I don't want to make this drive bootable. I'm trying to minimize any disk activity other than just copying files off.

I'll take a look at BartPE.

Anything else?

try the freezer thing. Sounds crazy, but it actually works.

I've read up on the freezer thing, and think I'll pass.

That technique may or may not work, and with older ball bearing drives, it might not have been risky, but hyrdo dynamic seals on more modern drives my be damaged by the cold temps.

Like I said, I'm looking for suggestions for a liveCD or bootable flash drive with some recovery tools. I think if I can get access to the drive from a different boot source, I should be able to get the few files I need off of it.

Thanks for the suggestions. Please keep them coming.

Apparently Tycho had good luck with PhotoRec recently.

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Ok, now that looks like a good tool. Even if it doesn't work for this specific application, it's a nice one to have.

Thanks!

Not sure if it will help but you could also try SpinRite

Wow...

Spinrite is still around? I remember them from way back...

NinjaEdit: The current version (6.0) of spinrite came out in 2004!!!

So are you saying you can't use it ?

SystemRescueCd is my go-to swiss army knife for these kinds of, well...system rescue operations. Even for Windows boxes. Imaging the failing volume with ddrescue is probably the way to go. Do your data recovery from the image, not the failing drive.

You may have to do some dmraid configuration to make the volume accessible, but unfortunately I don't think I can walk you through that. It's not a tool I usually mess with. I've needed to perform this exact operation a handful of times, and it was always a matter of me fumbling through the man page until I got it sorted out. I think SystemRescueCD has gotten a bit more sophisticated about hardware detection, though. So if you're lucky, it may have already detected the array and set up dev nodes for you.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Thank you Stathol!

Last time I had to recover data from a failing drive I just popped the thing into an external enclosure, and used it via a USB cable. Worked first time and I got everything off it I wanted

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Which would be fine if Midgen weren't using a striped array...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Actually,

I should update this thread.

As it turns out, the drives weren't striped after all. It was an older system (I hadn't messed with it in a while and I know it was striped at one time) with three physical drives that I thougth I had striped, but it turns out the drive I was having trouble with wasn't.. it was just a single seagate 750G drive (yea, the ones with all of the problems from a few years ago).

I didn't have a lot of time last night, but I did try connecting the offending drive to another system to see if it was accessible.

At this point, I'm suspecting that the problem is with the electronics and not the physical medium. When I initially connected it, the drive showed up in the disk management tool in windows as a healthy 750G drive. As soon as I opened explorer and tried moving data off of it, the screen flickered and the drive disappeared completely... like it didn't exist.

It was late, and I put it away and went to bed. I'll get back to it later today when I have some time.

I have an external SATA to USB adapter I'm going to use. I have three identical drives, two of which are empty and destined for the recycle bin (I don't trust them any more). If the problem persists, I may try transplating the electronics package from one of the good units to the bad one to see if that allows me to access it.

Another option I have is to take to the data recovery place down the street. They have a 'only pay for what we recover' policy. I know someone who knows someone that works there, so I may inquire with them.

Anyway, thanks for all of your suggestions!

Edit: The I have a backup of the stuff I need from about 2 weeks ago or so. So I need to decide if this is really worth investing a lot of time/energy/money into.