Unknown effect on Hard Disk

[|Leviathan|]

About a week ago, a freind of mine started having a blue screen whenever he turned on his pc and tried to boot up windows xp. This occured both in normal and in safe mode.

I told him to give me the hard disk so that I make a backup of his files, but I encountered a problem which i still haven't met a solution for.

When i attached the hard disk as secondary on another pc, it was succesfully detected and installed.

The problem is as follows, from 'My Computer', when I right click on the drive and select properties the pie chart shows that 72 out of 74gb are in use. That is the correct ammount of data on the disk.

But, when i open the drive folder, and select all the folder/files in the drive [including hidden items] they total to 35gb.

Actually on further inspection i found out that it was my friend's user profile that was missing, and only one profile out of four, with the other 3 intact with all the data available.

I checked the disk for physical errors, defragmented the disk, and checked the system for viruses with multiple antivirus software.

Yet, the problem persists.
If anyone knows a way to solve this problem, his help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lazn_Work]

I checked the disk for physical errors, defragmented the disk, and checked the system for viruses with multiple antivirus software.

Ouch, when you are doing data recovery, never defragment the drive before you get the data off. By doing so you have most likely guaranteed that any data recovery software will not be able to find your damaged files.

==>Lazn

 

[drizzt81]

Ouch, when you are doing data recovery, never defragment the drive before you get the data off. By doing so you have most likely guaranteed that any data recovery software will not be able to find your damaged files.

==>Lazn

yep, i learned that the hard way too. 120GB down the drain back that day.

 

[|Leviathan|]

Ouch, when you are doing data recovery, never defragment the drive before you get the data off. By doing so you have most likely guaranteed that any data recovery software will not be able to find your damaged files.

==>Lazn

actually there is a way out,

i didn;t defragment the original disk, [since it was more than 97% full], i cloned that hard disk on a higher capacity hd [120gb] so that there would be the necessary 15% available for defragmentation...

so basically the original disk is untouched, now you mentioned recovery software?

 

[BinarySynapse]

If your using XP Home try booting into safe mode and taking ownership of the entire drive. I think XP will hide any folder that belongs to profiles that are password protected if they aren't native to the system.

 

[drizzt81]

actually there is a way out,

i didn;t defragment the original disk, [since it was more than 97% full], i cloned that hard disk on a higher capacity hd [120gb] so that there would be the necessary 15% available for defragmentation...

so basically the original disk is untouched, now you mentioned recovery software?

I suggest that you test-run all recovery on the cloned drive first. if the original drive IS failing, try not to power it up until you think you know how to get the data off. If, for example, the poster above me is correct in his analysis, then you can recover all data from the cloned drive.

I am impressed with your foresight on cloning the drive. Props++;

 

[|Leviathan|]

Problem is:

I am not running windows xp home
Trying to boot on that hd in safe mode = blue screen
Trying to boot on another hd with the cloned hd in safe mode = nothing new

now i have looked around for some recovery software amongst others these seems the best, but do you have any alternative solutions?
you know; programs which you have used yourself and can personally [almost] garauntee that no damage will be done and that the data will be actually recovered

File Scavenger
Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery Software
Unistal Data Recovery

Thanks again

 

[DougLite]

Is the STOP error 0x0000007B?

If so, now that you have it cloned, run chkdsk /f from either the recovery console or as a data drive in another machine.

 

[BinarySynapse]

Problem is:

I am not running windows xp home
Trying to boot on that hd in safe mode = blue screen
Trying to boot on another hd with the cloned hd in safe mode = nothing new

now i have looked around for some recovery software amongst others these seems the best, but do you have any alternative solutions?
you know; programs which you have used yourself and can personally [almost] garauntee that no damage will be done and that the data will be actually recovered

File Scavenger
Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery Software
Unistal Data Recovery

Thanks again

I've used PC Inspector File Recovery (I think that's what it was called) before and it worked great. I think it was even free, but I don't remember since it was a couple years ago.