Recover files from a corrupt drive (USB or IDE?)

I have this old iomega 80GB external drive from way back in 2004. I have a lot of my old photos on this drive from when I was just starting photography. It somehow got corrupted a few years back so I kinda left it in storage and didn't mess with it at all.

Earlier this month, I encountered a problem with an SD card that was somehow corrupted and the photos on it were from a very important shoot. So I tried the different recovery softwares listed in another thread. Stellar Phoenix Recovery did the trick and recovered everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. Even photos from a different shoot. I was so impressed by the software that I immediately thought of recovering the files from my old iomega external drive.

So I plug it in last night and it's still running, almost 12 hours later. It has recovered 634MB so far. At the rate it's going, it looks like scanning and recovering the files from the drive will take 1 whole week!? When I recovered files from the corrupted SD card (which was 16GB) it took maybe 2-3 hours I think, just using the SD slot in my macbook. So it's not really a question of whether I can recover the files or not... it's more of a question about how long it takes to recover them.

Would it be faster if I took the hard drive out of the enclosure and connected it to my desktop computer? I'm pretty sure this still has an IDE cable but it's ok since my desktop still supports IDE. Or would it be the same? Does anyone have experience on this?

I'm pretty sure this is a USB 2.0 drive, but maybe since it's been corrupted pretty bad, it's having trouble reading all the sectors on the disk. The drive is formatted in FAT32 not NTFS.

Most hard drives from the IDE era on have internal read-correction, etc. firmware which a recovery app will try to make use of. It's probably spending most of its time trying to read the media, not to transfer the data to the computer for analysis and recovery. So changing to an IDE/PATA connection won't make a whole lot of difference.

I don't have an answer, however I'm fixing to find out. I have an old Internal IDE drive that I lost a ton of photos on, and just put it aside. I think I'll see what happens.

Thanks for your input Jon. I stopped the scanning midway and managed to recover just a few files, but even just copying the files from the old HD to my computer took forever. Maybe there's something wrong with the plates in the hard drive itself?

Hi Ron, hope you have better luck than I do. Let us know how things go with your testing.

So far not good. I can't get my PC to see the drive, I think it may be completely dead. I'll have to play with it later.

This is the kind of thing that I like to keep an older laptop or something around for. My friend is currently using a small Raspberry Pi based computer with a large backup battery. Drive recovery, especially with older drives, is frequently bound by the drive itself. So with the cheap little system set up it can be left to sit there and churn numbers for a week or two without bothering your main computer. Ideally use something on a battery backup, as you don't want to have to restart a two week long scan if the power flicks off for 30 seconds.

Luckless wrote in post #17263186
This is the kind of thing that I like to keep an older laptop or something around for. My friend is currently using a small Raspberry Pi based computer with a large backup battery. Drive recovery, especially with older drives, is frequently bound by the drive itself. So with the cheap little system set up it can be left to sit there and churn numbers for a week or two without bothering your main computer. Ideally use something on a battery backup, as you don't want to have to restart a two week long scan if the power flicks off for 30 seconds.

Whoa... you mean to say a week long scan is a normal thing for data recovery? Even for just an 80GB drive? I have an old laptop here with a broken LCD, but works with an external monitor. I could probably install recovery software on it and leave it running to finish the scan... but a full week non-stop scan is a normal thing?

It depends on the drive and what you are doing with it. I've had a few that would constantly throw errors and took ages to go through. But usually they're in the hours range. When it is taking that long then it suggests that there was either something wonky with the software settings, or the drive itself has issues.

Argh! I was going to try the drive recovery again this weekend, but the drive started clicking!

http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Click_of_death

Seems like this was common with iomega! Yikes! Fingers crossed that this will still work.

marathon wrote in post #17263380
Whoa... you mean to say a week long scan is a normal thing for data recovery? Even for just an 80GB drive? I have an old laptop here with a broken LCD, but works with an external monitor. I could probably install recovery software on it and leave it running to finish the scan... but a full week non-stop scan is a normal thing?

Do not forget that the Iomega is a SERIAL access device, not a RANDOM access device like a harddrive or even a floppy disk!...If it has to have its directory reconstructed, the recovery software has to find it in the Iomega disk directory, scan serially to the actual data, scab back (rewind back) to the directory and try to fix part of the directory, and then scan forward serially again to find a bit more data, then scan back to the directory and fix another little bit.... ad infinitum!