Anybody recover files from a hard drive?

[kjmdrumz3]

Lost ALL of my files. I'm really only worried about the pictures. My wife and I probably have a few gigs of my son from birth until now (4 mos) and I can't start the computer. Keep getting the <windows root>\system32\hal.dll is either missing or corrupted right after turning the machine on. Won't boot in safe mode or anything. I already replaced the computer but I was trying to salvage my pictures. Can anyone get them off for me? I'll mail the hard drives to you and throw you a few bucks. Thanks.

Toshiba G25
2x60gb HD

[K1W1]

Do you have access to another PC?

If so take the drive out of your PC connect it to the other one as a slave and you will probably find that all the data can be read just fine. You then just remove all the data, reformat the drive, reinstall windows and the programs and put the data back.

If the data is corrupted (unlikely) there are plenty of free data recovery programs around that you will be able to use.

EDIT:
BTW have you Googled hal.dll? I did it doesn't look like anything that is particularly hard to fix if you have the original Windows CD for your PC.

Try this link. (http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/restorehaldll.htm)

[XaiLo]

How did you have the drives configured and where were the image located? or the Path:

[kjmdrumz3]

Everything was working fine. When I rebooted BAM. Is a hard drive a hard drive or are they manufacturer specific? Would a laptop hard drive work on a desktop?

[kjmdrumz3]

Most of them were in folders on the desktop

[kjmdrumz3]

BTW have you Googled hal.dll? I did it doesn't look like anything that is particularly hard to fix if you have the original Windows CD for your PC.

Don't have it. Bought it used a year ago. Have the Toshiba CD which just wipes out everything, but no recovery CD

[K1W1]

Don't have it. Bought it used a year ago. Have the Toshiba CD which just wipes out everything, but no recovery CD

Can you borrow a CD?

[K1W1]

Would a laptop hard drive work on a desktop?


If it's an IDE drive as long as you have the appropriate interface plug or cable the answer is yes.
If it's SATA then the answer is just yes.

[kjmdrumz3]

As long as you have the appropriate interface plug or cable the answer is yes.

How would I find what I would need?

[K1W1]

If the notebook hard drive is IDE you need a little adapter that coverts the larger 3.5" IDE connection (from a desk top) to the smaller 2.5" hard drive connector plus it allows a connection for the power input.
It's the sort of thing that you would be likely to find in a store that sells electronic components somewhere like Tandy where Geeks hang out.

The other option which is probably easier is to get an external USB hard drive case or docking station designed for a 2.5" notebook drive then just put the drive into it and connect it to any other PC viz USB.

Docking stations look like this (http://pctechbytestoday.com/2008/07/ide-and-sata-hard-drive-docking-stations/) most of the new ones are SATA but there are some IDE ones around.

[kjmdrumz3]

I have one of the drives connected to my comp but cant open, etc. until I format it. Wont that erase my data? I guess it doesn't help that the drive is xp and the desktop is vista. I guess I have to find someone with xp?

[K1W1]

Vista should be able to read an XP drive.

Have you been into the Hardware Manager to see if the drive is mounted okay? (I don't have a Vista PC here at the moment to give you the exact place to look)

[kjmdrumz3]

Vista should be able to read an XP drive.

Have you been into the Hardware Manager to see if the drive is mounted okay? (I don't have a Vista PC here at the moment to give you the exact place to look)

I'll have to check it out tomorrow. I've already taken it out and buttoned up the desktop and I'm tired as hell. Thanks for the help, and I'll take it to pm's if needed.

[Visual Reality]

HAL.dll - this could have been resolved a few different ways without losing any data.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about6705.html
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/missinghaldll.htm

But since you already replaced the computer, just take out the old drive and put it in the new one. Access it via Windows and copy your files over. Do not format, as that will wipe everything. Vista and XP use the same file systems, no reason to format. It may need to be assigned a drive letter, go into Disk Management to check this.

http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-vista/how-to-use-disk-management-in-vista/

Tell us whether or not the disk is actually displayed in there first.

[kjmdrumz3]

HAL.dll - this could have been resolved a few different ways without losing any data.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about6705.html
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/missinghaldll.htm

But since you already replaced the computer, just take out the old drive and put it in the new one. Access it via Windows and copy your files over. Do not format, as that will wipe everything. Vista and XP use the same file systems, no reason to format. It may need to be assigned a drive letter, go into Disk Management to check this.

http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-vista/how-to-use-disk-management-in-vista/

Tell us whether or not the disk is actually displayed in there first.


Thanks for the info bro but I cant get the laptop to boot, in safe mode or otherwise.

[jcon]

Your issue would probably be better served on a forum that specializes in that?

[Visual Reality]

Thanks for the info bro but I cant get the laptop to boot, in safe mode or otherwise.
I thought you said you got the hard drives out of it?

[tizeye]

I have one of the drives connected to my comp but cant open, etc. until I format it. Wont that erase my data? I guess it doesn't help that the drive is xp and the desktop is vista. I guess I have to find someone with xp?


Yes it will erase EVERYTHING if you format. 99.9% of the time the failure to start us due to Windows becoming corrupted in the startup, and everything else on the drive is intact. While the slave idea is good if you have another desktop, a far better idea is the external case - which are cheap. Take the corrupted drive out and insert it in the case. It will connect to other computers - including the laptop - via USB port. Then navigate to where your desired files are and copy over to the host computer.

I am going through the same thing now - except mine was due to a nasy "antivirus2009" rogue malware infection. Unfortunately, I never did full backups with an external drive so I can't take what would be a good drive out of an external case and insert in computer. Now, I just bought a new harddrive and did a clean install. Will also do a mirror backup befoe I even thing about attaching that infected drive to retrieve photos and other documents. My big concern now is if those documents carry a trojan - thus the clean backup if it rears it's ugly head.

EDIT: Just re-read your first sentence. Don't know what your computer experience is but would be normal that windows would not "open" as is no longer the primary drive. It would be "accessed". Go to "accessories" "windows explorer" choose "computer" if that is not the defaunt. You should see all drives listed there. Then access the appropriate one. You can edit/copy/paste from there. Vista will absolutely read an XP harddrive. During the install, I had a problem with Vista recognizing a dvd drive existed (was shown in BIOS and could actually boot from it). During my troubleshooting, tested the EIDE system by removing the drive and attaching an old XP harddrive to it. Vista recognized that no problem. Turns out on the dvd drive issue, after all my troubleshooting failed, googled the problem - apparently well known - and required manually editing a line from the registry.

Also, for photos and other important docs. Best practice is to keep at least 3 copies. Original, backup to external source (harddrive), and backup to an off-site source (burn to cd's kept at office, preferable to 3rd party storage that can suddenly disappear). If your house burnt down and you lost the computer and backup drive, you would still have your external off site for recovery.

[Cyberwlf]

Do a virus scan then on your documents, documents wont automatically infect your machine unless they are opened in Word or a relevant viewer, so they are safe to copy back, just don't preview them even till you've done a scan with an upto date virus checker.

People shouldn't ever be trusting all their data to one place, it's like the memory card thread a while back here, trusting so much data to something so fallible is only looking for trouble. Hard drives are the most common cause of hardware failure in a machine. With something like photos back them up to another hard drive, not on a new partition of the same drive.

Norton SystemWorks to name just one package offers file recovery tools, there's a number of other applications out there which do similar things, just check www.download.com and search there, so should your hard drive be genuinely stuffed, you can mostly salvage most of your files.

But do NOT format that drive first. It's actually a myth that a formatted hard drive can't be salvaged, as all Windows does in a typical 'Quick Format' is to wipe the index files which tells the computer where the files are located on the drive and doesn't wipe the files itself, only a 'full format' will do that (and even they can be recovered by the right software unless you use military strength formatting). But in spite of that, you just make your life harder by formatting it.

As mentioned here boot off an external OS installation (it doesn't even have to be Windows or off a hard drive, you can just get one of those USB Flash Disk based distributions of Linux and boot off that, long as it has NTFS support) and copy it to an external drive, then you can do a clean reinstall on your existing boot drive and copy everything back.

There's also a chance you may be able to avoid all this by using something like a Windows Repair Tool. Windows OS CD allows you to do a Repair of the OS installation if you boot off the Windows CD, meaning all your apps will remain in place, as will all your documents, but depends just how rooted your OS installation actually is too.

Anyhow hope that helps!

[Visual Reality]

A repair would fix the broken hal.dll as suggested above. The only problem is you need a Windows CD that is equal to or newer. You can't repair an XP Service Pack 2 OS with an original XP disc for example. Personally I roll all the updates and integrate the latest service pack and burn a new disc every time I need it. For example, I have a WinXP Professioanl + SP3 + all updates to January 2009 CD that I built with the RyanVM Integrator. It installs as XP Service Pack 3 right from the disc. When I install, I don't need hours and hours of Windows Updates. You can spend your entire day doing those if your install is old enough.

I shouldn't say that's the only problem, it rebuilds your registry so none of your programs are registered as installed, which will make some of them not run. It at least gets you back into windows to your data though, but I always end up doing a clean install so I really don't like the repair option except for a few cases.

[kjmdrumz3]

assigned a drive letter, it shows up fine but I still can't do anything with it.

[kirks]

Don't panic -- it sounds like your physical drive is fine. Just Windows died.

Once you determine what kind of drive you have (IDE, SATA, etc), it will be pretty easy to recover your images.

If I were you, I'd consider purchasing a "Hard Drive Enclosure" -- many are available in the $20 or $25 range. For example, here's one from New Egg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145375

Again, make sure you get the correct size (3.5" desktop or 2.5" laptop) and format (SATA, IDE, etc.). This will convert your drive to an external USB drive.

Copy your valuable data, then reformat the drive and use it for backups and extra storage.

KirkS

[Visual Reality]

assigned a drive letter, it shows up fine but I still can't do anything with it.
Post a screen shot (use Print Screen then paste into an image program) of what you're seeing, otherwise I have no idea what's going on.

[Cyberwlf]

Hang on, there's no need to open up the PC and move the hard drive to an external case. If the drive itself is fine, one should focus on just purely having an external boot source, opening up a machine, especially if you don't know what you're doing, is just a cry for some guy to make money off you fixing your PC later.

Firstly, So if the Windows install is indeed rooted, first try doing a repair of it if you can get your hands on a copy of the Windows OS Install CD (and if you don't have one, you really should acquire one...)

Secondly, even sparing repairing your existing installation, just buy an existing external hard drive, they are as cheap as chips these days and almost as common. 3.5" 1TB drives are even very affordable these days, and when you combine their External PSU+USB2 interface with the 7200rpm drives (vs more costly USB Power Assisted 5400rpm 2.5" drives) it makes for a decent package for both booting off (at faster speeds than your laptop is likely to boot natively, if it is indeed a laptop) and better for copying files to too. (Just to complicate things further, if your PC has eSATA or Firewire 800 ports, get an external which supports those connections, as it'll free up your CPU when copying files and give you superior copying/booting speeds than USB2).

Problem is, you need another an OS installation still if you do the second (ie try to boot off another hard drive to copy off your existing Windows hard drive), so that brings you point to my first point. Get a Windows OS CD! :)

[Visual Reality]

Secondly, even sparing repairing your existing installation, just buy an existing external hard drive, they are as cheap as chips these days and almost as common. 3.5" 1TB drives are even very affordable these days, and when you combine their External PSU+USB2 interface with the 7200rpm drives (vs more costly USB Power Assisted 5400rpm 2.5" drives) it makes for a decent package for both booting off (at faster speeds than your laptop is likely to boot natively, if it is indeed a laptop) and better for copying files to too. (Just to complicate things further, if your PC has eSATA or Firewire 800 ports, get an external which supports those connections, as it'll free up your CPU when copying files and give you superior copying/booting speeds than USB2).
1. USB 2.0 limits transfers to around 30MB/sec. This is slower than modern laptop hard drives, even if they are only 5400RPM. The 250GB HDD in my laptop does around 50MB/s tested by HDTune.

2. eSATA is nice. I always transfer this way when I can. Gets me about 3x the speed of USB 2.0

3. USB 3.0 is coming...when, I don't know, but it sure will be nice. eSATA may be fast, but it isn't as user friendly or plug-and-play.

[Cyberwlf]

USB 3.0 just confuses kjm further :P As i dont think its in any consumer level products yet. I think there's even a new faster FW too, but nothing in a product yet either.

Good point re USB2 transfer limit Vs drive transfer limit, but part of that is also determined by the chipset the external case uses, some externals support 'turbo' style operations, and some even support multiple USB connections to surpass USB 2.0 limits.

Granted, FW800/eSATA is way better supported/more common, and any modern PC can support either, with eSATA support easy to get. eSATA 1 supports upto 1.5GBit, eSATA 2 supports upto 3GBit. eSATA 2 if it became more common (ie built in more often) would really negate the need for USB 3.0 for external hard drives actually, you know, for when USB 3.0 actually goes mainstream that is! Because USB3's fallback to USB2 speeds is far more painful a transition than eSATA 2 to 1. That said, USB3.0 is promising 5GBit transfer rates, but then eSATA 3 is coming...and THAT does 6GBit!.... But THEN there is the consideration that standard hard disks only really support upto 1.5GBit xfer rates anyhow, so unless a person gets a SSD then it'll go upto 3Gbit potentially, meaning we don't even really need anything faster than eSATA 2! ;)

Anyhow, sorry for going OT here kjm!

[Visual Reality]

One of the main things is more power supplied by the USB 3.0 port, meaning the drive can be powered without a plug/adapter. USB is much more plug and play also.

[Cyberwlf]

Both USB and Firewire are Plug n Play and offer self powered options actually ;)

You'll find USB copied Firewire in those respects, there's more self powered USB devices purely as USB became more popular and Firewire devices have often been of the less portable nature to have a need for being self powered, but Firewire has always supported self powered devices though since its original spec. eSATA is the only which is purely a data only connection.

USB however is not considered PlugnPlay for Win98 and below machines though (which is why external USB devices often come with small drivers CD for Win9x users), where as Firewire was supported by Windows98 natively :p

[Visual Reality]

Both USB and Firewire are Plug n Play and offer self powered options actually ;)
Never said otherwise. What I meant was e-SATA is not very plug and play. It may in theory be better in an AHCI enabled OS but I don't have mine set up that way, and I always have to go into Device Manager and "Scan for Hardware" for it to find my e-SATA drive. A minor inconvenience for the time it saves me when doing huge transfers.


You'll find USB copied Firewire in those respects, there's more self powered USB devices purely as USB became more popular and Firewire devices have often been of the less portable nature to have a need for being self powered, but Firewire has always supported self powered devices though since its original spec.
And that would be because Apple got greedy and wanted too much in royalties to use Firewire, which is why we saw the Universal Serial Bus take off so quickly.

I'm not sure where our OP went, we need some screenshots of what he/she is seeing so we can help further.

[Cyberwlf]

Yeah Apple got greedy indeed.

And I think our overly technical discussion as to the semantics of the technology might've scared kjm off!

But yeah, KJM still has the issue he either needs:

a. A Windows CD to attempt a repair of the existing install
b. Another drive *with* a Windows installation on it to copy the files from it to the new drive (unless he goes for a free linux distro with NTFS support which will serve the purpose of allowing him to back up his files still but wont fix his Windows installation)

[K1W1]

And I think our overly technical discussion as to the semantics of the technology might've scared kjm off!

I don't think a truer statement has ever been written on this forum. Maybe it could be used a guide for future threads.
Stay on topic when somebody has a genuine problem.

[kjmdrumz3]

I'm here guys, been a bit busy with the wife and son the last few days. I'm not so much worried about actually getting the laptop fixed as I am getting the pictures off the drive. So an external enclosure will allow me to do that? Even if Windows doesn't recognize the drive itself?

[Cyberwlf]

External enclosure will allow you to boot off that once you install an operating system on it. So as i said, you will need a Windows installation or Linux installation (with NTFS support) on the external drive to allow it to boot in the first place though, so you should be attempting to get both those things, then you can copy all the files off the existing hard disk inside your machine.

[kirks]

External enclosure will allow you to boot off that once you install an operating system on it. So as i said, you will need a Windows installation or Linux installation

Sorry Cyberwlf, but I respectfully disagree.

He doesn't want to BOOT the old drive. I understood him to say that he has a new machine already. He just wants to get the images off the old drive. Attempts to repair or reinstall Windows will jeopardize the chances of getting those files safely extracted.

As long as the drive is functioning mechanically, we don't care if Windows will boot. He can stick the drive in an external enclosure, connect it to his new PC via USB (I'm ignoring the debate on the merits of USB/FW), and copy those images to a safe location on his new PC.

THEN, a decision can be made about reformatting, reinstalling Windows, etc.

KirkS

[Cyberwlf]

You misunderstood my post Kirk. To clarify for you it meant if he has an external hard drive enclosure, that hard drive will have no operating system on it. Therefore the need for an installation there is so the external can boot, it has nothing to do with the internal drive, otherwise he can attach an external but the computer won't be able to do anything with it!

For the record though, reinstalling/repairing Windows won't actually have any impact to any images files, as Windows repair only replaces Microsoft Windows files, nothing else.

If he does indeed have a new PC then sure he can just rip out the existing hard drive and put it in an enclosure and copy off the drive from the other PC if he knows how to open his machine up and take it out and install it into an external case without damaging it.

[kjmdrumz3]

Sorry Cyberwlf, but I respectfully disagree.

He doesn't want to BOOT the old drive. I understood him to say that he has a new machine already. He just wants to get the images off the old drive. Attempts to repair or reinstall Windows will jeopardize the chances of getting those files safely extracted.

As long as the drive is functioning mechanically, we don't care if Windows will boot. He can stick the drive in an external enclosure, connect it to his new PC via USB (I'm ignoring the debate on the merits of USB/FW), and copy those images to a safe location on his new PC.

THEN, a decision can be made about reformatting, reinstalling Windows, etc.

KirkS


That's exactly what I'm trying to do. Maybe I'll work on fixing the laptop later, but right now I just need the images off the hard drive. Both are already out of the laptop. Thanks guys.