I finally completed one of the tasks that has been on the backburner for some time in Stately Thomas Manor–recovering data from a formatted hard drive. It went surprisingly well, and the rest of the tale is below.
In my old, now passed, desktop workstation, I had a SCSI card installed. Connected to that card was an 18GB SCSI drive that had been with me for some time. This hard drive contained the bulk of my digital music collection, mostly albums I had ripped over the years.
When I purchased my now purloined Dell workstation back in March, I had migrated all the data from this drive onto the SATA hard drive that came with the machine. Safe in the belief that nothing would happen to this machine, I formatted the SCSI drive. I then removed the SCSI card and hard drive from that machine, and I stored them away for posterity.
With the theft of my workstation, my precious music collection was now gone. I had some of it on my aged Dell DJ, but I still had approximately 10GB of music that were on the hard drive of a machine that was presumably sold by some half-witted heroin addict looking for just enough cash for their next dose of smack. All I had was my formatted hard drive, but I had no machine to connect the drive and recover the data.
Move ahead to this Fall, and I have finally gotten around to replacing my purloined Dell. On Sunday afternoon, I hunkered down in the home office. I cracked open the case, and I installed the SCSI card with little problem whatsoever. The innards of my Vostro 400 are cramped but manageable for someone with the meat hooks I call hands. The one issue I had was that the Vostro has the new SATA 5-pin power connectors, and there were no Molex 4-pin connections. I had investigated this earlier that week, and I had a package of SATA-to-Molex connectors shipped from Newegg.com. Once I connected that to the drive, I was able to connect that to the SATA power connector. I left the case open since this was a temporary addition, and I powered on the machine and booted up the machine. I was met with the familiar sound of the SCSI drive spinning up.
Now, I have a formatted drive connected to my Windows XP machine. Of course, some of you are saying, “The drive is formatted. How are you going to recover data from it?” Well, a drive format merely flips a bit on the sectors of the drive that held data. The data is not truly gone from the drive unless you employ a multiple pass method of over-writing the drive. I did not do this on this drive, so I knew that, for the most part, my data was over-ridden. I just needed a way to recover the data.
So, I resorted to my Linux laptop while searching for a free and open-source way to restore the data. I came across a few things to assist, but they all looked at it from a data forensics standpoint. I decided to take a look at SpinRite, as it worked so well for another job I had performed before. The option I saw would have taken far too long to restore the data. I did a bit more Googling, and EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional came up as a potential tool. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl, and it met my needs capably.
After about 90 minutes of letting Data Recovery Wizard scan the drive, review the findings, and select the data to restore, I started to see my music collection come back. After it was all said and done, I had about 15GB of my music and entertaining sound collection back on my hard drive. There were some files that were not quite recovered correctly. For example, I had files with the same name and size of another file containing other files. No worries, as with all the files recovered, this only affected around 20 files. Additionally, most of my music is located elsewhere or are albumb I already own, so fixing this issue is relatively minor.
Needless to say, I am pretty happy to have my music back. It took longer than it needed to, but I can now rock out to my eclectic mix of music.
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