Corrupt/Unallocated ' C ' drive - Need help with fixing the HD or recovering data
Hello Folks,
My 1 TB Seagate 3.5" Hard Drive with Windows 7 64 Bit OS would not boot a few days ago. I tried to access the drive using Gparted & Linux Mint. The physical condition of the drive appears to be fine = meaning = it spins as it should with no clicks or heart attacks. It has ' C ' (250GB) and ' D ' (700GB) partitions. ' D ' drive is full of data (docs, photos, music etc) which I have no problem accessing, copying & moving. In fact, I have already copied all that data to other media.
Now my issue is the ' C ' drive. I still do have some very important data sitting in what would have been 'My Documents' folder under ' C ' that I would like to extract. The Hard Drive is UNTOUCHED. I have not over written, formatted or jump started the drive. But I have indeed tried to 'read' the drive by connecting it to another desktop as a secondary drive, by using a variety of software.
Here are the ones I used....
Photorec
Qphotorec
Minitool Partition Wizard
Active File Recovery
Active Partition Recovery
Photorec, Qphotorec, Active File Recovery have run for days, but retrieved ' 0 ' data. I was not able to recover the partition either through the aforementioned other software. I have not run any Windows Disc utilities (such as 'repair your computer' option) fearing it might alter the drive parameters forever rendering it useless.
I have run out of ideas. Can any of you smart folks give me suggestions as to how I can 'recover' the drive? Any windows or Linux software tools you can recommend? I have attached images of the drives as they show up. The partition in question is the ' L ' drive in the picture. The other picture is the scan I ran through 'active file recovery' software. Thank you very much.
Yes, I forgot to mention. I have run Testdisk as well. I ran most of them as part of a Linux distro. Yes, the interface shows a lot of bad sector, but can this be trusted? With the way how these software are being constructed/written, I am skeptical & would not want to believe everything I am seeing to be true. :- ) Does Ultimate Boot CD have any interesting tools I could use? How about the typical Windows Repair tool? Anyone?
You can run the Seatools diags from UBCD5. I'm pretty sure it's going to confirm what we already know; bad sectors. If you have bad sectors, you should replace the drive.
I'm guessing you mounted the drive on a Windows system. If so, you can run the Windows version of Seatools.
You already ran Testdisk and Photorec (both are on UBCD5).
I don't think Windows Repair would help, since it can't even see the partition.
+ Midknyte + Thank you very, very much for all your inputs & suggestions. I suppose I will use seatools & UBCD & a few more Linux tools to see what they can offer me. Some people (and that includes myself) never learn. LOL But hey, I have been backing up all my stuff on a weekly basis. It so happens that I lost the partition just when I dumped more data on C than usual. But I am going to keep the drive intact & will continue to do my circus. Yes, it is pretty much a dead horse at this point, but if some miracle happens, no one would be happier than I to come back & share what I did.