Disaster - Major data loss

Well it's clear I celebrated too soon - I've lost at least 3 months of data, the entire (digital) life record of my daughter - gutted...

While my HDD does appear to working as described in the last post, however, the data on the drive is old at least three months old.

How did that happen?

Clearly the Raid driver was not working at all for the last three months and the second drive has not been getting mirrored the updates...

I just don't get it and I'm just gutted.  We had so many great photos from that period that we will never get back..

So the question now is how do you get data off a SATA drive that has given up the ghost...

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2007
  http://www.data-recovery-software.net/ R-Studio worked pretty well when my file system died.

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2007
  If the drives were mirrored then they would be set up as a Raid 1 array, not Raid 0 as you mentioned in your last post. There's a number of third party tools you could try to recover your files with - Winternals ERD Commander (which MS bought a while back) has got some good stuff that may help. But you may need to take both drives into a specialist data recovery place for more help.

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2007
  I know it sounds odd but sticking it in the freezer has helped me in the past. Obviously I was pretty desperate to even try it but, I have recovered a server and several laptops that way. Depending on what is wrong with the drive, it can help. The best result was to put the entire server in a chest freezer and run it from there long enough to get the data.

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2007
  I feel for you, I have been there as well.. I have used these guys in AKL: http://www.datarecovery.co.nz/data-recovery.html I had a dead IDE drive and they were able to retrieve my personal data (yes, photos like you!) If it is personal data, they have a special rate. Rgds Chris

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2007
  I just set up a home NAS solution to cover me for exacvtly this kind of situation. And of course we must always remember raid is for redundancy not backup! But its a bit late for that now. I lost a whole bunch of photos of a camera once and that was horrible - I ended up talking to forensics specialists who couldnt get it back (aparently some cameras write zeros all over the card to delete all photos. arg) So anyway it now probably comes down to how much you want to spend. From what I've heard theres not much that can't be recovered, but this may depend on how toasted your drive is. There's some very skilled ppl in this space in NZ.. I think i spoke to http://www.datarecovery.co.nz or someone... they had a minimum charge to get started which was like $700 or something but it may be worth it if they can get your prized info back...

• Anonymous
  November 18, 2007
  I've had a tough time over the last week or so. Last Monday my Hard Drive in my new HP laptop died, taking

• Anonymous
  November 18, 2007
  I've had a tough time over the last week or so. Last Monday my Hard Drive in my new HP laptop died