I need to recover a zipped file from a corrupted hard drive

[hawkairen]

The hard drive is NOT physically damaged, only inaccessible due to the current state: I accidentally, began ghost imaging and completed about 10% of the initial process before I canceled it. So now the system won't boot. I get a single flashing cursor in the top left corner of the screen. If I connect the hard drive to a SATA-to-USB adapter and connect it to my Windows XP computer it will show that the 'Mass Storage Device' is found and installed. But I can't see the device in My Computer or Disk Management. What I think needs to be done is have the device connected via USB mounted so that I can use a file recovery program to scan the drive for files. Does anyone have any ideas? I know I can complete the reimage and then try to recover the file but its about 2.6 GB in size and I have a feeling that no programs will be able to successfully recover the whole file. I would like to recover the file without reimaging the drive because chances of the files being overwritten are much greater if the image completes.

 

[Tony Stewart]

X64 OS? or x32?
>2TB? it may not be used on XP x32

Recuva is free and works. use defunct drive in advanced, as long as BIOS recognizes it.

Spinrite is even better for total recovery if possible.

 

[festlizeng]

There are plenty of file recovery tools to deal with your problem. But whatever tool you use,
**broken link removed**
I would still make an image of the damaged drive just in case that revovery tools makes more damage than necessary. http://www.fixya.com/support/t25728245-problem_need_recover_zipped_file

 

[tunedwolf]

Was the drive that has the data on it you need, the destination or the source drive in the imaging operation? If it's was the destination drive, Ghost will have very likely wiped the fat table and depending on your settings, adjusted your partition table to suit the image you were working with. So whatever tools you use, they must be able to read the disk even if the partition tables are messed up. You should not make any changes or writes to the damaged drive whatsoever, the drive should be treated as "read only". So make sure any tools that you use do not alter the drive in any way. Likewise, only ever save recovered data to a different drive. I personally would perform a bit copy of the damaged drive to an image file and work with a copy of that mounted on another machine, rather than work on the damaged drive. If you mess up, it's just a matter of copying the file again and having another go, there's no risk to the data on the target drive. If on the other hand the drive you need to recover from was the source drive in the imaging operation, then Ghost sometimes installs its own boot files and reboots to run its imaging script. If the operation is interrupted for some reason, those boot files are not removed because Ghost didn't complete its script. If that is the case, you can usually restore the original boot files using the inbuilt tools and utilities for your version of the operating system.