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How To Recover An Unreadable Hard-Drive For Free (12/19/16)

Monday, December 19th, 2016

A few days ago, I was looking for some files that weren’t on my Win 7 Pro PC, but rather on a “retired” external USB hard-drive.  It was an old drive that had been taken out of service due to its age and the fact that it was almost full.  I attached the drive to electrical power and my computer, and the drive registered, but was unreadable.  A box popped up and asked if I wanted to format the drive.  I said no.  I knew that the files were still on that drive, but the computer couldn’t access them.   I tried a few things, but to no avail.  The company that manufactures the drive offers recovery software for $99.00 (not guaranteed), or will recover a drive if sent to them, starting at $499.00, up to $20,000.00.  There is no charge if they can’t recover anything.

Read all the text below before proceeding.

I didn’t think the files in question were worth anything near this expenditure, but other files on the drive may be.  Then I thought, “Find out what to do on YouTube!”  I found this 2-minute, 12-second video that saved me a lot of money at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix13LRGmzk8 .

The one thing the video author didn’t address is how to get the correct command prompt to attempt this repair.  I will add this:  To get the proper Command Prompt, either find the short-cut in your Start Button Menu (usually in “All Programs”> Accessories) , and right-click it.  Then click “Run As Administrator.”  The command prompt will then say “C:\Windows\System32.”  If you can’t find the Command Prompt shortcut, simply type “cmd” (without the quote marks) in the query line at the bottom of the start menu, and cmd.exe will show up above in the list.  Right-click cmd.exe and “Run As Administrator.”  Then follow the YouTube video.  I don’t know if it will work for you (and I guarantee nothing, but it worked for me), and there may be files lost due to what caused the unreadable disk in the first place.

But give it some time as it takes a while, and the bigger the drive, the longer it takes.  On my drive, the program found 6 bad sectors and overwrote them and the drive was readable in a few minutes, once Windows had indexed the drive.  I was able to find and use the files I was looking for.  I do not know if I lost anything valuable as there are quite a lot of files on this drive.

(Only do this repair if you are willing to assume all the risk.)

Gary Silverstein

-We Shoot

Tags: computer, computers, data, hard drive, harddrive, storage
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The Memory Card Reader From Hell!

Thursday, May 29th, 2014

Professional photographers and amateurs alike have many things in common in this digital age:  our cameras put the images we take on digital media, such as Compact Flash cards, SD cards, or similar devices.  Some of the different methods for extracting the information from these cards are to run a cable (usually USB) to the camera from the computer and we instruct the computer to copy, transfer, or import the images to the computer’s hard drive(s), or we take the digital media card out of the camera and place it in a reader that serves the same function.  Some of us have built-in slots in our desktop computers that will accommodate various kinds of cards.  My last two computers have had the slots built in.

I’m a professional photographer and videographer.  For many shoots, I go on location and have several Compact Flash cards that fit in my still cameras, and the images I shoot are stored on the CF cards awaiting transfer to my computer’s multiple hard drives.  Since I usually can’t reshoot the images, and there is much more security in the redundancy of having the files on different drives, I store my images on several external drives simultaneously.  Hard drives do fail.  There is no excuse for losing a client’s images.

The critical point, however, is that much can happen to the information on the cards during the transfer process.  Pulling a card out of a camera that is turned on can corrupt the card, as can pulling a card out of a reader during a copy phase.  So, I breathe easier once the images have been copied or imported to my first hard drive without a hitch.  Until I have the images on more than one hard drive, however, I keep the images on the card, as well, for backup in case something bad happens.

I recently got a wakeup call, and it was just by chance.  I had been using the CF card slot in my PC to copy files from the card to the computer.  I didn’t have a job for a little while and I had left the images from the last shoot on the card in the camera after first copying them to several drives on my computer.  I put the card back in my camera after copying it.  I usually copy to my main drive first, add keywords, my copyright, etc. to the meta data, and then copy all that to a couple more external drives for security.

About a week after I had copied the images on the card I had put back into the camera, I went to reset the camera’s settings for the most likely settings for my next shoot.  It showed I still had images on the card, so I hit the view button to see which images were on the card before deleting them, AND, HORRORS,  THEY LOOKED BADLY PIXELATED!  I looked at several of the images in the camera and most had this problem.  I hit the magnify button, and they looked sharp again, but when going back to the “fit on screen” image they again looked pixelated.  All I had done was to copy them to the hard drive on my computer.  The images that had been copied to the hard drive were in no way affected, but the card seemed to be corrupted.  That never happened before.

Luckily, I had already uploaded the finished job to the client the day before, so I knew that the images in the computer were not corrupted.

As a pro, I can’t leave anything to chance, so I had to find out whether the card was bad, the camera had a problem, or what had screwed up the images while the card was in the computer.

My first test was to shoot test images to see what was happening.  Once shot, I looked at each at the back of the camera.  They looked normal.  I turned off the camera, popped the card, and put it in the built-in PC reader.  I copied the files to a folder on my desktop, and made sure it was finished copying.  I removed the card from the PC.  I made a second folder on my desktop.  I then used Photoshop to view the images in the first folder on my desktop.  They looked OK.  I put the card back in the camera and turned the viewer on, and they were corrupted!  I took the card out of the camera again, and put it back in the PC and copied the same files to the second folder on my desktop.  I clicked on the first image in Photoshop and a dialog box popped up saying that Photoshop could not read the image format.  The card was corrupted.  Period.

I had an old external USB 2.0 card reader I used to use before having built-in slots, so I dusted it off and plugged it into an open USB slot on my computer.  I put the card in the camera again and formatted the card.  Again I took some test images.  I took the card out of the camera and put it in the external reader.  It took longer than the built-in reader, but there weren’t that many images.  They copied perfectly.  I took the card from the reader and put it back in the camera.  I turned on the viewer, and the pictures looked normal, not corrupted.  I shut off the camera and again removed the card.  I again copied the files to another folder on my desktop – they could be opened in Photoshop and looked normal.

I determined that the built-in reader in the PC was corrupting the images while copying.  I don’t know why: was it software, or hardware?  I determined that the best way around the problem was to not use the built-in slots again on this computer, but to bypass them.  I had lost faith in them.  However, the USB 2.0 external reader is incredibly slow.  I also use my readers for HD video on SDHC cards, and it takes forever to import video files.  So, I decided to buy a new USB 3.0 external reader.  I found one on B&H’s website for $14.95 (with no shipping) at http://bhpho.to/SVr845 .  I ordered it and tried it out with all my different media from different cameras.  It seems to work well, and it is blazing fast compared with USB 2.0.

The moral of the story is:  Don’t be complacent about your digital photography equipment.  Don’t assume all is well without checking it out occasionally.  I could have gotten a bad surprise if I hadn’t looked at my camera, and taken action.  Being a pro, you’ve got to be on your toes!

– Gary Silverstein

Tags: 2.0, 3.0, camera, card, CF, CF card, commercial photography, Compact Flash, corrupt, corrupting, corruption, drive, file, files, hard drive, image, memory card, PC, pixel, pixelated, professional, reader, SD, SDHC, still, stills, USB, video
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And, Sometimes, It Just Blows Up!

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

In the past, a professional, commercial photographer needed a camera and film, to put it simply, to put an image into media.  A commercial lab or a photographer’s darkroom was needed to process that image and turn it into something a client could use.  Those labs largely have just about disappeared.  And so, now digital is king.

In the present, a professional, commercial photographer’s computer is as important to him or her as a camera.  The computer takes the place of the lab and/or darkroom.

When that computer goes on the fritz, it can be a bumpy ride.  Take my old Intel-based i7 workstation computer as an example.  Although very powerful when I bought it (it is still serviceable and still considered powerful today), it was getting a bit long in the tooth at 3.5 years old.  Several months ago, I started to notice things happening for which I had no explanation.  After leaving my computer idle for a time, I would come back to it, and programs I had left open would be gone and off the task bar.  Passwords I had earlier put in on some web pages had to be reloaded again.  I thought maybe I had only imagined I had put in the passwords or opened programs.  Then one day something happened to illuminate that I was having computer malfunctions when I was working on an image, and the screen went black, stayed black for a number of seconds and then the computer rebooted.  Now I realized something really bad was afoot.  The reason my websites had to be reopened with a password again, and programs that had been open had closed, was that the computer had an intermittent failure for some reason, and had rebooted while I was away from it.  What could be causing this?

The first problem I noticed was that the image file I had just spent two hours working on in Photoshop, although saved at intervals, was now corrupted.  I still had the original file, but all the work I had done had vanished into thin air.  The reason is the file was open, hadn’t been closed properly, Photoshop hadn’t been exited properly, and Windows hadn’t also been shut down properly.  When a computer crashes like that, it can’t close out anything on the hard drive, and so a corruption occurs.  The second thing that dawned on me was that this could definitely happen again.  This was totally unacceptable.  This either means repairs or replacement of this computer.  Either way, it is going to be expensive, and very time-consuming.

I used to fix cars for a living a long time ago at a new car dealership, and one of the things the boss used to stick me with was fixing odd intermittent problems.  These were more numerous than one would think.  I did learn one thing about intermittent problems.  They invariably would show as “no fault found” (NFF) when the car was working OK.  All testing devices said that things were working to specification and, because the problem was intermittent, it was my job to drive the car until it happened again.  I would take these cars home with me and drive them like they were mine until I experienced the problem.  I would sometimes drive the car for weeks!  My experience would lead me to note everything about why the car had failed:  Was the car warmed up, was it a cool day, was it uphill or downhill, etc., all clues that would lead me to some conclusion.  Sometimes I experienced the failure once in maybe a week, sometimes several times an hour.  But I knew the problem the customer had, and I had seen it first-hand.  Since cars have electricity, and in the later years, electronics, most of the time the culprit would be there.  Sometimes I would find the problem: a wire that had touched a hot surface and the insulation had burned off and allowed the wire to ground when movement of the car caused the wire to touch ground, or a plug that didn’t lock into place properly from the factory and lost contact with movement of the car.  But, electronics added a whole new dimension to the intermittent problem – that of the failed sensor or computer.  These units were sealed, and when you tested them, and the car was running, there was NFF, but failure could happen for almost any reason.  The fix for this was to start replacing parts with known good parts, and an educated guess.  At the dealership, that meant taking a part off the shelf, putting it in the car and letting the customer drive away with it to see if it still had the problem.  It was not a problem while the car was in warranty as the old part was kept and returned to the car should that not be the problem.  By process of elimination, even very knotty problems could be fixed.  The problem became more complicated on customer pay, as I had to charge the customer for labor, but I could still refund the money on the part, as long as I returned it to the parts shelf.  When working with an independent shop, however, the customer and the independent repair garage can’t return used electrical parts to their suppliers, and that is where this gets back to my computer.

The computer was past the warranty, so anybody I took it to could test it and find something wrong, or, nothing wrong.  It could crash twice in an hour or go as long as ten days without crashing.  You had to be watching it to see it happen.  An unlikely scenario at a computer repair facility.  The computer can’t record why it crashed as the crash wipes out that capability.

I consulted the Internet, and got several ideas of what it could be:  anything and everything.  It could be the video card.  In my case, it has to be more than just a video card.  It has to be an Adobe-certified video card.  For some of my work, 3D capability is something that may be needed in Photoshop or some of my video programs.  This also means this card is relatively expensive.  It could be the motherboard.  It could be the processor.  It could be the memory, etc.  I ran the manufacturer’s diagnostic for five hours, and it tested just about everything in the computer.  NFF.  I had an expert steer me to a free downloadable diagnostic program on the ‘Net called memtest 86 that ran from a disk in the CD drive.  He said he uses it and it really wrings out the processor, motherboard, and the memory, and usually finds failures within 10 minutes.  I ran it for five hours, and it found absolutely nothing wrong.

My local computer boutique wanted $39.00 to diagnose the problem.  There was just one problem, however.  It was Monday, and they were backed up until Thursday.  For an extra $89.00, they would move me up in the queue to next.

So, for $138.00 I could get a diagnosis.  Not fixed, mind you, just diagnosed.  My mechanical sense about intermittent problems started tingling, and I knew that I could get the dreaded NFF from them.  Or they could surmise what was wrong and we would start sticking new parts in my old computer until it was either fixed, or I could watch someone scratch his head and say, “Gee, I’ve never seen that before!´  All after lightening my wallet for greenbacks I would need in order to replace my aging box.

Not wanting to take out my wallet and throw parts at this problem until it was fixed, I had to take action.  The one item it could be was a bad C:drive.  If it was that, I would have to spend $100 to $200 and go through the two weeks or so it would take to reload and configure all my programs, desktop, network, and so on, and I still wouldn’t be sure it was fixed until it could run for months without failure.  Other components in this computer were as old as any part I would be replacing.

So, I opted to the one approach that should work – replace the car, er – computer.  Sorry, I have cars on the brain.

I can’t buy just any computer, either.  Considering the fact that I work with large image files with multiple layers, and video programs that suck up processor speed and memory, I need something powerful.  I need another i7 box, with lots of memory, a big hard-drive, an Adobe-certified video card.  It needs to have several USB 3.0 ports as I back up my work on high-speed USB 3.0 drives that can transfer multi-gigabyte files in seconds rather than minutes.

Another thing I would look for is getting the computer with Windows 7 Professional.  It was what I worked with in my old box, and I didn’t know if some of my old programs would be compatible with Windows 8.

Fortunately, I found almost what I was looking for in a Dell from Office Depot.  A fourth-generation i7 processor, an Adobe-certified video card, eight GB of ram (expandable to 32 GB), a one-TB hard drive, and Win 7 Pro.  Expansion slots.  Etc.  For less than my last computer, but still more than one would pay for just an everyday computer.  It would need more memory, of course, available from third party suppliers.  It would need an additional third-party expansion card to run another of my drives (an eSATA) as there is no native port built in for that connection.

I purchased this hot rod and it actually came in two days with free shipping.  I then began the arduous task of getting it to where I could work with it through configuration, calling Adobe and Microsoft to move licenses to my new computer.

I never got that far.  Two hours after firing up this turbo computer, it crashed.  Not quite the same as my old one.  This time it was software-related.  This one had the “Blue Screen of Death” or BSoD.  I didn’t think much of it until it happened a couple more times.  After much wrangling, I shipped the computer back through Office Depot and got a refund, and since the deal on this same model computer was still going on, I ordered another and kept my fingers crossed.  It also came in two days with free shipping.

After several weeks of installing and configuring hell, upgrading the memory, and adding the eSATA expansion card, I am typing this blog post on my second new computer.  Hopefully this one will last as long or longer than my 3.5 year-old computer.

BTW, I still don’t know what is wrong with the old computer.  Fortunately, I don’t have to find out.

My clients may sometimes wonder why pro commercial photography costs what it does.  Part of the reason is that I – and my computer – really are the lab, and my computer has to be up to the task.  The end result is great images that help my clients make money.

– Gary Silverstein

Tags: blue screen of death, computer, crash, graphics card, hard drive, http://weshoot.com, i7, intermittent, memory, problem, processor, ram, reboot
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Saving and backing up images . . .

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

A file saved on a computer isn’t a secure file, unless it exists in at least two different places.  If it exists on two different hard drives, or a hard drive and a DVD- or CD-Rom or more drives or disks, then it has a greater chance of being secure.

Years ago, I would copy my image files from the camera’s memory card to my C: drive and work on them and save them back to the C: drive and when completed to a CD-Rom disk.  I had a CD go bad on me once, with the only copies of some files for our then main client on that CD.  I panicked.  Even though that job was “finished,” if the client called and wanted others on that disk or said they lost the original disk, I would have to say I lost the data.  I contacted many people, and no one could repair the disk.  The drive would not recognize the disk.  I finally located a company in the Bay Area who recovered the files on the disk and burnt them on another.

I made sure all media was good from that point on by checking every image on the disk and making sure all of them would open.  I would also keep copies on my hard drive as long as I could.  At some point, the CD and DVD+ RW had come out, and, although expensive, I was able to keep the data a little safer with more copies.

Hard drives started getting less expensive, and I bought an external 500-gigabyte USB 2.0 hard drive as a back-up drive.  I was still copying the files to DVD-ROMs when the job was finished, clearing the space on the main C: drive in my computer, but leaving it on the external back-up drive.  I at least had two copies of my files to make them more secure.  One day, I went to access a file on that back-up drive, and the screen went black.  The back-up drive ground to a halt.  It never restarted.  I didn’t lose any files as they were still on my main drive and on disk media.  I replaced the 500GB drive with another brand and it was 750GB.

About a year later, I decided USB 2.0 hard drives were relatively cheap, and it cost about the same as several hundred DVD-Rom blanks, so why not back up onto two external drives, and, when full, inventory them, disconnect them from the computer, and store them until images on them are needed.  Since I am mirroring the data on two external drives, and since one is full prior to the other, as long as I have an inventory, I can find any files I am searching for.  I no longer have to waste time burning DVDs and proofing every image on them as I already have done that on the hard drives.

My current setup is an ultrafast PC with two internal eSATA one terabyte drives, in non-raid configuration.  All images are first saved to only one of the internal drives.  One drive has all the programs and my document libraries on it with lots of room to add more.  The other internal drive has mostly images on it.  Once I work on an image on the internal drive, at the end of the session, I copy it to each of the external USB 2.0 drives.  This give me 3 copies of each file, guarding against loss.  The USB 2.0 drives are a bit slow for the huge amount of data that pours from the eSATA drive in the computer.  Once I start the copying, I can go and have a cup of coffee and when I return, the copying is usually done.  I just retired the 3/4 terabyte (750GB) drive as it had less than 10% free space left.  I don’t think it is a good idea to fill a drive completely, as drives need some free space to efficiently move the data around when reading and writing.  Since USB 3.0 is now available, I purchased a new one-terabyte drive, and also upgraded to a USB 3.0 host adapter card with two external ports and a bridge inside to allow upgrading to two faster eSATA  drives in the future.  I could have purchased a two- or three-terabyte drive instead, but I think one terabyte is inherently safer.  Drives run all the time and will wear out at some point, maybe before filling up.  I think one terabyte will probably be full before it will fail and will be a good storage medium since it will only be called upon to provide an image that is no longer available to the computer from other means.  And, in the end, I will still have at least two copies.  I am gambling a little more money buying separate smaller drives, but that is the way I deal with it.

One remark I will make is that the USB 3.0 is way faster than the USB 2.0 drive it replaced.  And I have cut the amount of work I have to do to back up my files.  I will have a little less expense when I replace the other USB 2.0 drive as I don’t h ave to buy a host adapter card for it.

If you have images or other important files you really care about, do yourself a favor.  Back those files up on separate media and/or hard drives.  You’ ll be glad you did.

For those of you who want a freeware inventory program that I found on the ‘net that seems to work well, go to the contact page on our website at http://weshoot.com, email me, and I will send you the link to the download page.  It can be used to inventory media and hard drives that later will be separated from the computer.

-Gary Silverstein

Tags: back-up, backup, copy, copying, data, file, hard drive, image, save, saving, USB
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