I desperately need to get some data off a hard drive, so I can submit a paper to a journal, and use some data to basically finish my PhD.

The background: I have (had?) a Dell XPS2 (running XP pro), and just a few days after the 4 year extended warranty ran out, the video card burned out. While waiting on a quote for the video card, I need to get some data off the hard drive to, among other things, submit a paper to a journal, analyze data from several recent tests, and finish my dissertation.

I bought a USB adapter so I could plug in the hard drive to the adapter and the adapter to a desktop and pull the data off. The only other computer/s I have access to are campus desktops.

However, all my data was under "Documents and Settings\the naked prophet\Desktop" and apparently I have to be logged on to my laptop to access anything within "Documents and Settings\the naked prophet" When I try to access any of the files, all it tells me is "... is not accessible. Access is denied." When I try to copy the whole folder, it says "Cannot create or replace ...: Access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use."

I can access other files, such as the "Documents and Settings\All Users" but there's nothing there of use to me. Everything useful is on the restricted portion of the HDD.

But wait, there's more! I disconnected it and took it to the university Walk-In IT service center, and when they plugged the HDD in, it repeatedly made noises like it was spinning up and then immediately shutting off. They said it was a head crash, and it was not fixable unless I send the HDD in to a cleanroom-equipped facility for data recovery, which starts around $500. BUT, they said, if I could get it to work again, I should remove the data immediately because it may not start up again after that.

I take it back to my office, and first try, it works. So now I'm afraid to unplug it. I call IT, figuring they may be able to walk me through accessing the data. They say I need to use BartPE to make a live-CD and run windows from the live CD instead of a hard drive, then I can access my data.

But I can't do it on a campus computer. They can charge $45/hour to get the data off, but they also said if I disconnect it it may not work when they plug it in to get the data off it.

So, is there any way to get around whatever's blocking me from getting to my data?

I already tried turning off "simple sharing" under My Computer, then setting the sharing permissions - but I don't have Admin privileges, so that won't work.

Maybe there wasn't a head crash at all? It's been running fine since about 4:00 when I got off the phone with IT, and it only made the bad noises when they tried to connect to it. Is there something else that would cause a similar noise?

I appreciate any help.

Sounds like a nuked permissions issue. It's possible that a hardware hiccup contributed to scribbling bad data on your disk. Evacuating your files might be possible.

Get yourself a Linux live CD. It's trivial to find a Ubuntu disk anymore, just head over to the CS building and yell "Penguinize me!" I believe IT has (had?) disk images on their mirror if you feel like rolling your own CD. If all else fails, get Chank to do it.

Since you'll be running as the superuser you'll have no permissions issues as far as filesystem access is concerned. Just copy and paste somewhere else, like a USB memory key.

There's also ways to recursively reset permissions to relaxed from within Windows itself. I don't really recommend doing that at this point. You need to treat this like a forensic investigation. If the problem actually is bad hardware then writing new metadata to the disk is only going to make things worse. The BartPE CD may work as well, but I don't know if Windows can be coaxed to access a disk in read-only mode (*I* wouldn't trust it...)

If there's still problems, then yeah, you'll probably need to start thinking about trading in the car for the cash you'll need for clean room reconstruction.

+1 on the linux live cd


For the few drives I've put in external enclosures it seems at some point they've all done weird things noise wise. I'd just kill power and turn them back on and they haven't let me down though... few years and still going strong haha

The issue with running the Live CD is that linux sometimes can have marginal capability to read NTFS. Also what is causing your issue is that when you created your user account you most likely checked the box that said something along the lines of "make my profile private" this encrypts the data in your profile, and it can be rather difficult to get around. According to Microsoft its "impossible" and its been quite a while since I have had to do it. After i had to do it once I never again protected my profile with windows.

As long as it's not encrypted, Linux should be fine. In fact, AFAIK, Linux still does read-only for NTFS which is probably for the best, to make sure he doesn't accidentally overwrite anything.

Linux is pretty good at reading NTFS by this point. If you can't find a Live CD, I can give you one and/or walk you through the process to get the data off your computer. Feel free to PM me or go to RC2 Floor 3 and ask where James is, but I'll be gone for the weekend after Friday around 4.

I've used a program called PhotoRec. You can google it. It worked for me.

I'm downloading an Ubuntu live CD right now.

We'll see how this works.

Thanks.

Another +1 for linux.

In addition, if the drive is physically malfunctioning there is a great little program called SpinRite you can buy from GRC (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm). It's not guaranteed to work but it has a pretty darn good chance of making the drive functional long enough to grab your data from it (I've used it on two dead drives and it's been able to save them both). It's only $89 too, not $500

Turns out to not be necessary. I just plugged it in to the wife's laptop (she drove back to Rolla on short notice), and it worked just fine, no problems with malfunctioning or permissions. I think it just sucks to be logged on to campus computers.

The hard drive has be started and stopped half a dozen times since then, and hasn't had bad noises since then. I think the IT guys just misinterpreted the noise of it spinning up and then down repeatedly, because the computer didn't recognize it or something? When you plug the HDD adapter into the power supply, it does nothing until you plug the USB cable into the computer - when the computer recognizes it as a hard drive, it spins up. That's my guess anyway.

I dunno....I'd get the data off ASAP if I were you. I had a hard drive that made some weird noises for a few days, then the noises quit so I didn't think anything of it, then a couple weeks after that, the drive completely crapped out with no warning and everything on it was unrecoverable (fortunately, I had some fairly recent backups of the important stuff). I certainly hope that's not the case for you, but if this data is that important, you might at the very least want to copy it to another HD or burn it to a CD or something, just in case (which you should be doing with important data anyways, right? ).

Yeah, sounds like you got reallll freakin lucky. Pray to whatever gods you have, and give your wife a big kiss, because it sounds like you were one or two boots away from restarting your phd.

We backed up just about everything on the drive. Will find out soon, when I eventually get the quote from Dell, if I can fix the video card issue, then I'll probably be getting another hard drive anyway.