NTFS data recovery

[Jerry]

On Mon, 9 Jul 2012 18:54:37 +0200
Polytropon articulated:

> On Mon, 9 Jul 2012 16:01:56 +0000, Graeme Dargie wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > I have been given a laptop to look at for a friend, the hard disk
> > is close to death with a SMART error on POST. My initial thought
> > was to just mount it on an Windows 7 machine and grab what I can
> > from the drive.
> 
> Bad idea. You cannot fully make sure that the disk's content
> isn't altered. There's no "mount -o ro" in "Windows". Even
> worse, it might lead to more corruption during attempts to
> "repair" it.

I have seen this work, but not on Windows 7.

(based on Windows 2003 SP2)

1) switch off "automount" using the mountvol.exe command

2) present disk to Windows 2003 SP2

3) do not mount the disk

4) launch diskpart

5) do a "list disk" and "list volume"

6) note down the correct volume number

7) in diskpart do a "select volume X" (where X is the correct volume number)

8) then in diskpart doa "att vol set readonly"

9) then in diskpart do a "detail vol" and ensure the readonly bit is set

10) then you can mount the volume, the volume will be readonly

Interestingly enough, only a few months ago, I used SpinRite 6 to
recover an 80 Gb disk that was supposedly fried. If the HD can be seen
by the system hardware, SpinRite has a fighting chance of recovering it.
It took a week but it got all of the data back. I did take the HD out of
the original PC and put it into a backup unit since I could not tie
that PC up for an extended time. SpinRite does not need a super high
speed machine to work off of.

Good luck, you'll need it.

-- 
Jerry ♔

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