require help in understanding recovered files

[sudeep]

Hi, I tried the trial version to recover files from my hitachi HDD and it seemed to have found my MFT where the OS count shot up to 26K+ at which point it became quite constant (increases of a 5 counts in about 10 mins of search). So I stopped the search thinking that wow my files are safe. And then I activated my product to save my files. I could not see the preview of most of the files though but as I read in some other posts I thought that this was not much of a problem and carried on to save. The software started saving the files - the status bar showed about 6.5 gb of files selected for save. The saving was very slow but consistant. At this point I thought - lets check the files being saved and to my surprise every files was saved in a completed strange format (some as xml files) and I could not use any of them. Strangely enough, there was a folder called lost files with few files starting with MFT e.g. MFT 77872. Does this make any sense? Am I doing anything wrong? please help. Now my HDD is not even turning up as a slave and I fear that I will not be able to get my files any more.

[GDH]

Hi,

This is very strange behavior. It sounds like your drive stopped working or went to sleep during the search.

Shut everything down, check all the connections and try again. Check in Windows, MY COMPUTER > MANAGE > DISK MANAGEMENT if your PC sees the physical hard drive connected to the PC.

Can you hear the drive spinning? Is it making any strange noises?

[sudeep]

YES! My HDD is giving me problems once in a while. It often starts off and then I hear a 'click click' kind of noise. But then again it does come alive once in a while and spins smoothly. I can then see the drive listed under computer management and status says healthy. It is at this point that I ran the recover software and everything worked as was stated in the directions. It's only when I stopped the software after the OS records shot to 26k+ and tried saving files did I see the odd format of the recovered files and also the MFT files under a LOST folder. And now the HDD has started clicking again :-(. I am trying to get it to work again but it has not responded since. Do you have any idea as to what the MFT files are?

[sudeep]

My HDD just came alive after few hrs of clicking. I can hear the smooth wiz of the spindle. But now I see something new - Under comp management I am seeing that the drive is listed with a red arrow against it and a label unallocated - previously it used to be listed as drive E and status as RAW. At this point I am also getting a message saying 'You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it' and gives me the option to use MBR. As I click ok, the message I get is operation could not be carried out due to I/O failure. Does this mean that my DISK is finally fried? or is there any hope?

[GDH]

It sounds like your drive is physically on its last legs.

The best data recovery option is to ship this drive to a hardware data recovery service. If you would like to arrange a free quote, you can use the link on this page:

Data Recovery Service: Hardware data recovery service by GetData