Wanted: Hard-Drive Recovery Wizards

[Thropplenoggin]

The hard-drive of my trusty Samsung Q320 (Windows Vista) has given up the ghost. Now, when I power up, it beeps alarmingly (oh, look, a pun!) and then proceeds to a black screen with the following message:

"operating system not found"

I then followed Samsung's advice, re-booting, going into the Setup Utility , and then look next to the "SATA Port 1" for the name of the hard-drive. If 'none' appears, as none does, they say that this means either the hard-drive is damaged or not connected properly. The drive is easily removed - I have tried removing it, replacing it and rebooting - but this was to no avail. So I assume, as it is 4 years old, that it is kaput.

I have backed up most things, but I would still like to try and get everything off the hard-drive that I may have missed (music, Word docs, photos, etc.). In order to do this, would I need to buy an internal hard-drive to USB adapter and then use another laptop to attempt to run recovery software on it? If so, which adapter would you recommend and which recovery software should I use?

The drive is a Western Digital 250GB SATA scorpion blue internal hd.

My other question is replacing the internal hard-drive with a new model to have a usable laptop again. How do you format the hard-drive and put an OS on it? Basic stuff, but I've never had to do this before.

Any advice from tech-savvy forumites would help to solace my existence at this point. Not the best start to a Sunday morning the ol' Thropplenoggin's ever had.

p.s. if some kind host could remove that extraneous 'w' from the thread title, this would also improve the Thropplenoggin humour.

[Frances_iom]

I assume it is a laptop - will be a sata 2.5in drive (the cheapest way used to be to buy a usb external drive and break open case but otherwise buy off internet or if immediate need from Maplins or PC World but expect to pay 10-20% more)
Your major problem is going to be to restore windoze as usually you don't get a cd/dvd restore disk and the windoze recovery is conventiently sitting on the last partition of the dead drive (that nice Mr Gates - now you realise why he raked in trillions) - the new drive will require formatting to windoze NTFS - one dodge is to get a USB thumbdrive with a bootable Linux image and then use this to format the harddrive - sometimes the BIOS on the laptop will offer to format a harddrive if so use this. - if you remembered to make dvd backups of the new machine then you should be able to restore from these
In not then bad luck - you might be able to acquire a recovery cd from the manufacturers (be wary of many online suppliers as you may be buying a malware ridden system)
Personally I'd put in a new drive - any convenient size but the 1T drives might not fit as they are thicker and buy any Linux magazine which has a copy of Mint 14 distribution - install this and run most windoze programs under WINE

[Thropplenoggin]

I assume it is a laptop - will be a sata 2.5in drive (the cheapest way used to be to buy a usb external drive and break open case but otherwise buy off internet or if immediate need from Maplins or PC World but expect to pay 10-20% more)
Your major problem is going to be to restore windoze as usually you don't get a cd/dvd restore disk and the windoze recovery is conventiently sitting on the last partition of the dead drive (that nice Mr Gates - now you realise why he raked in trillions) - the new drive will require formatting to windoze NTFS - one dodge is to get a USB thumbdrive with a bootable Linux image and then use this to format the harddrive - sometimes the BIOS on the laptop will offer to format a harddrive if so use this. - if you remembered to make dvd backups of the new machine then you should be able to restore from these
In not then bad luck - you might be able to acquire a recovery cd from the manufacturers (be wary of many online suppliers as you may be buying a malware ridden system)
Personally I'd put in a new drive - any convenient size but the 1T drives might not fit as they are thicker and buy any Linux magazine which has a copy of Mint 14 distribution - install this and run most windoze programs under WINE

I haven't really been able to parse much of this, Frances, but thanks all the same. Yes, it is a laptop.

If I procure the above-mentioned 'internal hard-drive to USB adapter', what are the chances of being able to get the files off it?

[Stunsworth]

If I procure the above-mentioned 'internal hard-drive to USB adapter', what are the chances of being able to get the files off it?

If there's a hardware problem with the drive 0%.

I think the earlier poster was explaining the cheapest way of obtaining a replacement drive was to buy an external drive, and cannibalise the hard drive inside of that.

Recovering the data on the hard drive is likely to be expensive- i.e hundreds of pounds.

[Frances_iom]

the first thing I'd do is to buy a Linux magazine with a CD rom that contains a trial version (ie one that works direct from CD) - the classic one for this task is Knoppix - if you have another machine you can download (try google) and burn a cd image - put this in after setting bios boot sequence to cd first - then once booted try to see if the harddrive is readable - if it is then it is rescueable - if Knoppix can't see the hard drive then it is probably wrecked. If it can see the harddrive then the master boot record on the drive is corrupt which is what is preventing a boot from it - this should be repairable by software but I've never had to repair a Vista drive as I normally don't even activate them but replace such with Linux.
You can also check out the Bios options to see if it can format harddrives whilst you are there
To gain access to the bios it is usually hold down delete key then turn on, then after a second or two release delete key - this should give you access to Bios (if delete key doesnt work try Escape or F2 - your book of instructions should actually tell you which key but most people have lost this useful info! and laptops differ)

Actually if you buy an exteranl USB drive then you get both a re-useable usb to SATA drive interface (just unscrew this from the backing case - not very pretty but functional ) and replacement harddrive - the seagate 500G (or 320G if you are on a budget) with the cable going in the side are my ones of choice don't buy a Western Digital as these dont have the required interface - the black plastic case needs a small flat screwdriver to prise open the plastic clips which since you are not going to reuse it can happily be broken - but first check the drive is working by plugging into another computer - if you have to remove the harddrive from laptop remove battery + unplug from mains - often merely accessing a plate on base of laptop (you need a small Philips head screwdriver) tho some laptops need the keyboard to be removed - there will be a plug poking into back of drive loosen this carefully (use small flat screwdriver to lever away) and dont try to pull away from laptop - actually trivially easy once you seen it done then merely undoing caddy and extracting drive from caddy

[Dave2002]

The hard-drive of my trusty Samsung Q320 (Windows Vista) has given up the ghost. Now, when I power up, it beeps alarmingly (oh, look, a pun!) and then proceeds to a black screen with the following message:

"operating system not found"

I then followed Samsung's advice, re-booting, going into the Setup Utility , and then look next to the "SATA Port 1" for the name of the hard-drive. If 'none' appears, as none does, they say that this means either the hard-drive is damaged or not connected properly. The drive is easily removed - I have tried removing it, replacing it and rebooting - but this was to no avail. So I assume, as it is 4 years old, that it is kaput.

I have backed up most things, but I would still like to try and get everything off the hard-drive that I may have missed (music, Word docs, photos, etc.). In order to do this, would I need to buy an internal hard-drive to USB adapter and then use another laptop to attempt to run recovery software on it? If so, which adapter would you recommend and which recovery software should I use?

The drive is a Western Digital 250GB SATA scorpion blue internal hd.

My other question is replacing the internal hard-drive with a new model to have a usable laptop again. How do you format the hard-drive and put an OS on it? Basic stuff, but I've never had to do this before.

Any advice from tech-savvy forumites would help to solace my existence at this point. Not the best start to a Sunday morning the ol' Thropplenoggin's ever had.

p.s. if some kind host could remove that extraneous 'w' from the thread title, this would also improve the Thropplenoggin humour.

I'd say don't do anything in a hurry. The message you have had might be similar to one which I've seen on a Vista laptop. It was impossible to boot off the hard drive. I found several locations offering restore or repair features, some of which didn't work, but eventually I found a disk image which I was able to put onto a CD. That booted up the laptop, and then it turned out to be possible to fix the drive. The failure might have been a boot sector problem.

As I recall I also made up a Live CD version of Linux, which booted, and this enabled the hard drive to be examined. I did this first, before trying to fix the Vista boot. It was possible to recover most of the files we wanted to another drive before tinkering with the Vista system. Eventually we did recover the Vista system with, as far as I could see, all the files, and then we scanned it for malware and generally tidied it up. It worked for quite a while after that, until the same problem reappeared. The second time I was able to fix things quicker, and it was less critical as we'd already got most of the wanted files backed off. Probably had to use System Restore to back up to an earlier point because of the high probability of malware.

I believe that if it isn't actually a hardware fault, then installing Windows 7 or Windows 8 over Vista might improve things a lot. We tried that, but unfortunately we abandoned the install because we didn't particularly want to do a clean install (it'd probably have been a good idea) and that Wonderful Mr Gates provided an install disc with both 32 bit and 64 bit versions. I can't remember which way round it was but we found that only one of those was going to work, and then it turned out that it was not possible to do an update install anyway, so we gave up. As already mentioned by A N Other, if the hardware has failed there's nothing much you can do to rescue the files or system, but I'd think it's worth trying to recover the system, so assume the hardware is OK at first until there's clear evidence to the contrary. It took me a week or more to find out how to do it, but it was successful, so that's why I'd suggest not erasing anything, or reformatting the drive, or doing anything to change the data on the drive until you're sure you can't get anything back. In that case you might just as well bin the presumed faulty drive.

[Dave2002]

If there's a hardware problem with the drive 0%.

I think the earlier poster was explaining the cheapest way of obtaining a replacement drive was to buy an external drive, and cannibalise the hard drive inside of that.

Recovering the data on the hard drive is likely to be expensive- i.e hundreds of pounds.

If you can boot up the system in Windows, and if the drive is readable, the Recuva program is amazingly competent at finding copies of files on your disc. You'll also realise that most drives aren't actually cleared when files are "deleted", and how/why the police and other agencies are able to see if you've any naughty stuff stored on your drives. Also why personal data, such as bank details, turns up in places like Nigeria and India for selling on to criminals when computers are sent for recycling, or to the tip.

If you can't boot in Windows you might be able to boot in Linux, but I don't know of a comparable recovery program.

[Frances_iom]

in Linux you just dd the harddrive to another drive/file and then examine at leisure - there are a couple of system recovery dvds which make regular appearances on the covers of Linux mags - these contain all the useful 'fishing' + recovery software but you never try fishing on the 'failed' drive - same trick used by forensics (+ also to business laptops taken into PRC it seems )
You might want to ask why windoze makes it very difficult to recover - eg I had a failed laptop due to the onboard power supply - running linux merely took out the harddrive and inserted into another laptop (not the same model) - bingo the system booted and an immediate replacement - try same trick on a Windoze box!