Recover hard drive

I'm trying to recover the information off my hard drive, if possible. I lost a lot of work (I should have have known better. I should have backed up much sooner, but I didn't).

My PC was running Windows 2000 service pack 1. It crashed. I checked the hard drive (Western Digital 100 GB) with Disk Editor, which I got from Norton SystemWorks 2003. Disk Editor sees the drive as only a physical drive, not a logical drive. What it shows is that the drive is all zeros, even the Master Boot Record and Partition Table.

I wonder if the data is still there, but the drive can't read it, or maybe some virus zeroed out the drive. Drive is still under warranty and I will return it, but I'm mostly care about all the info on it that's gone. Does anyone know any way (short of spending hundreds of dollars) to recover the data?

 

You could try hooking to another computer as a slave and see if its recognized.

 

I tried connecting the drive as a slave with another drive running Windows 2000 as a master. The bad drive wasn't recognized. I went into true dos and the bad drive still wasn't recognized. The BIOS does detect the drive, but only as a much smaller drive.

 

I am assuming that you reran the BIOS autodetect (on my MB highlight and press Enter).
Worrysome that DISKEDIT cannot see any data. Might indicate HD electronics failure, yet BIOS does see something.
And remember that there normally isn't any data after the MBR until sector 64.
You could try another low level disk editor like HexWorkshop or WinHex (these run in windows).
If a low level editor sees data then try a recovery program;
a couple suggestions:

DriveRescue is pretty good (and free). This is a direct download link:

http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/majorgeeks/drives/rescue.zip

You might also try DiskInvestigator (free):

http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html


testdisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/

PartitionTableDoctor: http://www.ptdd.com/

PC INSPECTOR
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm


Best

 

Thanks for your suggestions. I have a couple of those programs you listed. I'll download and try some of the others.

> And remember that there normally isn't any data after the MBR > until sector 64.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the above.
Correct me if I'm wrong:
Partition Table - On Absolute Sector 0
Master Boot Table - On Absolute Sector 0
1st FAT - Starts on Absolute Sector 32
2nd FAT - Starts on Absolute Sector 4057
Data Area - Starts on Absolute Sector 8082

Thanks both of you for your help. I'll try some of the suggestions.

 

If you count sectors starting with zero (512 byte sectors),
the first fat is at sector 63 byte 7E00 hex.
The first 63 (0-62) sectors are called the "head" and is reserved
for MBR, partition table and those boot manager programs
which i wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. So on all my HD's
sectors 1-62 contain zeros.
So unless you have 1024 byte sectors (very rare), the first fat is
at the 64th sector.

Sorry for the confusion, i was just thinking that with DISKEDIT
you may have been looking at sectors 1-62 and finding all zero.
Hope, hope. A wiped out MBR and partition table can be fixed,
but if you don't see anything but zeros everywhere .....

Best