Software recovery

If you have the OLD Norton for dos,the Norton Utilities 8.0 or earlier, you might try to make a binary copy of the disk, if memory plays no tricks on me disk edit is able to do this, if the disk is readable at all. It could be set to ignore all errors. At my work we did this, and wrote a fortran program to search for character blocks with the properties of source code. Each fortran progam ended with: end. We recovered about 95 % of the sourcecode on the disk. We sometimes ended up with 10 copies of each program, with a slightly different age/edit stage. :) Fragmented diskdata will be useless, but luckily the disk had recently been defragmented.

Many free utilities to recover data but I don't know how well the work. I usually pay for utilities to save my ass from data loss. This is what I use, it's not free but it is reasonable and it works.

I don't recommend free software for these things unless I have verified it. Maybe someone else can.

Try spinrite

Colin

Am I the only person who is shocked that you still had one of these that worked? What is this drive in a IBM PC AT?

Well anyhow I agree with what someone else suggested.. Try the old dos norton, maybe it will work.

Mike

I have an old Seagate boat anchor up in the attic and an RLL controller that still works AFAIK. Well it did work when it got stuck up there so no reason why it wouldn't. Even have an old Everex 8088 PC that could host that drive but I've no desire to mess with it.

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:40:32 -0700, " snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com" put finger to keyboard and composed:

There are two copies of the FAT. If only one copy is damaged, and if the file system is otherwise intact, then it should be possible to retrieve all your files.

I'd run Norton's Diskedit in maintenance mode and backup the D: partition (20MB ???) to a stack of floppy diskettes in sector mode. I'd then create a partition on a new HD and use Diskedit to transfer the backed up sectors to this new partition. Scandisk or Norton should then be able to repair the damaged FAT.

- Franc Zabkar

Try ontrak easy recovery if you can find it, might be something on hiren's bootcd or ultimate bootcd. As a matter of fact, use hiren's bootcd and under harddisk tools run MHDD, press F4 and turn remap and loop test/repair on. After that there's a big chance you find the drive can access your data. There are recovery tools on hiren's bootcd as well.

Cheetah

Some suggestions:

1. If this is really critical data, contact Ontrack for data recovery services and get a quote; they will disassemble the drive in a clean room and use special equipment to recover the data.

1. If it isn't quite so critical and you feel comfortable with running a failing drive for awhile, add an additional physical drive (suggest scsi) to the machine and use Norton Diskedit to copy all sectors to a file on the additional drive, with manual intervention to skip unreadable sectors as they occur. You can then use a variety of tools, including Diskedit, to analyze the data and recover the FAT to get access to your files.

2. After saving as much data from the drive as possible, you might consider running Ontrack Data Recovery tools on the original drive or on a working drive of the same geometry which contains a copy of the saved data from step 2. These tools provide a variety of salvage and analysis techniques superior to most other dos-based utilities.

1. Expect to analyze a lot of hex dumps of the FATs, Partition Tables and directories if you have a lot of damage and manually rebuild what you can ;)

I've gone through this process many times with varying degrees of success and have found that with considerable effort you can achieve good results.

Regards,

Michael

Pull the drive out and put it in a linux box or a system that can boot from CD-ROM, there's plenty of tools you can use to make an image of the drive, dd, ddrescue, etc. but if it's truly a hardware issue you may not be able to read it.

If the data is so important you should have backups.

I had resisted suggesting moving an antique MFM drive and controller or even booting some flavor of *nix on the original machine since support for the controller may be iffy on newer releases. Certainly if the O.P. has experience with unix there are all kinds of solutions for working with intact antique hardware using older releases, but in this case it would probably be safer to use the DOS-based tools previously mentioned. On a 386 or better class of PC, one could even boot a version of NT/2K and use 'unixtools' such as 'dd' for imaging the ailing drive, or 'diskprobe' for sector editing.

Regards,

Michael

I really appreciate all this great advice. The problem is I'm an electronics technician and although I do understand most of the concepts mentioned unfortunately when it comes to some of this stuff I'm afraid that I'm a bit of an ignoramus. I don't know about sector editing. I've heard of it but thats all. I may know enough to get myself into bigger trouble. I don't want to give up but this may be too much for me to try. Any of you guys live close to New Hampshire by chance who might have a week or so to spare......? Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Yeah I had loads of old 8088 era stuff.. I wish I had kept it now because people seem to pay good money for things I threw away 10 years ago.. Oh well.. I kept a few things out of it all. I've got some MFM and RLL hdd's but I doubt they work. My favorite is the double decker 5.25" drive. I think I will put it in my Athlon 3500+ just for fun.

Get Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software to rescue your data from inaccessible hard drive. Not a free tool but its give free demo download which let us see the preview of the data. A good utility for file and partition recovery, recovering the data from formatted hard drive, data loses due to software malfunction, viruses or sabotage. Download:

Hi!

First of all--if you get the data, then by all means, get it off that drive. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear of a an ST-251 still working, as the design was cheap and simple.

Unfortunately, these drives used a stepper motor to drive the heads around the platters. This setup is touchy and subject to drifting out of calibration over the years due to temperature shifts and drive movement. When this happens, the stepper can't be positioned to find the data where the drive and controller think it should be. You then get an error.

Back in "the old days" the suggested procedure was to keep backups, make regular backups and make a backup prior to moving the drive in any way whatsoever. It was also suggested to periodically run a low level format on the drive to "realign" everything, after making a backup and hopefully before the drive became unable to retrieve data.

As far as a solution goes, I'd highly recommend SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation. I never have run it on an ST-251 drive, but it certainly existed at the time those were popular. I've seen drives that it could and couldn't save...but the overwhelming majority were anywhere from much better to completely salvageable. SpinRite costs around $100 USD and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee if it doesn't work. I have no affiliation with GRC other than as a satisfied customer of theirs.

William

Stellar Phoenix works on *most* drives that will spin up. It's not cheap ($300 for the multi-system version with a USB dongle), but it

There's a download-only version for use on one PC that's a little cheaper.

John