Help for Scrambled Data

eric_s · Joined: Jul 16, 2003 Posts: 43 Location: Western Canada

A friend had a disk drive crash (Windows and the partition info. were scrambled). I slaved the old drive and thought I’d recovered the documents and pictures. No such luck. The Office header (?) looks good because all the documents have the proper icon and name. The problem is that using Word or WordPad or Notepad to open them yields only gibberish. Any suggestions to try to help recover the “lost” data?
The same is true for all her *.jpg files - they wil not display and yield and error on access.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2238 Location: Central FL, USA

Ask her..............was she using any drive compression or encryption program?

If not, you might try slaving the old drive to your own computer and then run chkdsk /f /r on it to see if it can be 'fixed'.
I've had pretty good luck with that in the past on a HD that wouldn't even boot.

Good Luck,
Doc Cool

eric_s · Joined: Jul 16, 2003 Posts: 43 Location: Western Canada

For brevity I left out all the following steps
1) Slave the "broken" drive and Ghost a copy to a large storage drive
2) Copy to DVD all of My Documents
3) Look at the documents on the DVD - They ALL have the proper Icon for Word 2003 ('cause Office 2003 is/was installed). When opened with Word data is a) all little boxes or b) trash and foreign characters.
4) Inspecting the Ghosted copy yields the same corruption.
5) Gingrely poking at the slaved drive shows the same problem - as if all the ones and zeros were shifted.
No encryption was used, and the drive/files were not compressed.

goretsky · Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 8:35 pm Post subject:

Hello,

Have you tried running a data recovery program against the disk image you created of the crashed hard disk drive?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

eric_s · Joined: Jul 16, 2003 Posts: 43 Location: Western Canada

Hi Aryeh - Perhaps I'm not digging deep enough, but all of the programs that I've looked at want to help me "recover deleted files or partitions." That isn't the problem. The Word 2003 files display the proper word icon but when accessed display only unreadable text. It is as if the underlying bits were right or left shifted to produce the altered text. If you can recommend a program that would attempt to correct that problem I’d be delighted.

goretsky · Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 11:07 pm Post subject:

Hello,

So there was no disk corruption at all? E.g., just the data?

Were any of the file or directory names garbled, or did they appear okay?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

eric_s · Joined: Jul 16, 2003 Posts: 43 Location: Western Canada

Sorry I didn't think to put in the entire story.
She turned on her PC and got the "Drive not found. Put in blah, blah, blah."

I removed the drive and slaved it in a test rig. Ghosted the entire drive to a 1TB "storage" drive. Found the proper My Documents folder and copied it to 5 DVDs.

Then I looked at the drive - some of the directories looked fine (found the My Documents without problem) but others, like the Windows directory were scrambled.

Looking at the Word 2003 documents from the DVDs produces two outcomes A) Pages full of little square boxes OR B) Undecipherable text in foreign letters and symbols.

There may not be a way to recover the data, but I’d like to try. Short of reading it bit by bit and attempting to left or right shift it a bit at a time that is.

PhotoCarp · Joined: Sep 06, 2007 Posts: 207 Location: New Jersey

First of all just because the file extension is .doc and the icon is for a Word document it doesn't mean it's a Word document. To prove this take a jpg and change the extension to .doc. Look at the icon. Voila, looks like a Word document. Then open the file. See? Gobbledygook.

You say that the hard drive crashed but you were able to get the files off of it? You say that the file names are all intact? Yet somehow the data is all corrupted

Now what could cause all the data to get scrambled? I would suspect a virus. Can you get it back? I doubt it. No harm in trying to run chkdsk or a data recovery program, especially if you have already backed up the HDD.

This is the scene where the doctor chimes in with "She should have used a back-up program. Then this wouldn't be an issue."

eric_s · Joined: Jul 16, 2003 Posts: 43 Location: Western Canada

Yeah - looks like the drive is going to a "class 100 clean room" in a location near by.

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

I'll second the statement about the extensions changing as I've had that happen, I think with w95, so I can't recall all the details as to what caused it or what I did about it or even the diagnostics but it DID do the same as mentioned.

No help, I know - just wanted to confirm...

BUT - I'll also, second the idea of running chkdsk - since you have it backed up, there is nothing to stop you from "experimenting".

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

never mind - bad post - nothing to see here - move along....

goretsky · Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 8:31 pm Post subject:

Hello,

Sounds like corrupted entries in the MFT.

Since you have an image of the disk to work with, you could try running one of the programs mentioned in this message thread and see what the results are.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky