I have a ride with those drives - 40GB shows as 479GB.....

[fLYtRap]

Hi,

okay now this is nuts. I am trying to recover data from a damaged 40GB laptop hard drive. I was looking for some free software and I found PC Inspector File Recovery that is scanning my drive right now. Although it is a 40GB drive it shows 479GB I don't know whats up with that. Before that I was trying Get Data Back which is not free, however also showed this drive as 479GB. Can anyone tell me what is wrong with that picture?

[redwudz]

I had the same thing happen with a old 2.1GB drive that showed as a 160GB drive. I pulled it out of the computer because I thought I had accidently switched drives. But I'm guessing the problem was because the drive was corrupted. I did partition and format it, then it showed the correct size. It must be more of a problem with the OS not reading it properly.

Good luck with the recovery.

[Heywould3]

no actually what its doing is finding what it thinks is 479 gigs of data. i ran into this also. its finding remnants of that much data it wont be able to recover anywhere near that obviously because most of the data has been over written. its just finding the meta or header data of old erased files.. if you go through and look at all the files and their sizes you will see what i mean. most of them will have an indicator telling you that you cant do anything with them.

[Bjs]

Maybe its not picking up the fact that the data comes from older , nolonger existing partitions , so all its reporting is max files located .

Give drive rescue a crack at it , it will discover partitions that nolonger exist on its own and which files reside within those partitions .

If its succesfull , files can be recovered if green , when saving , sellect the partition format that was used , and then save file ... if you dont use the correct format , the file will be useless .

Theres another free tool I found the other day which works ... but it saves files in raw data ... useless .

[fLYtRap]

no actually what its doing is finding what it thinks is 479 gigs of data. i ran into this also. its finding remnants of that much data it wont be able to recover anywhere near that obviously because most of the data has been over written. its just finding the meta or header data of old erased files.. if you go through and look at all the files and their sizes you will see what i mean. most of them will have an indicator telling you that you cant do anything with them.

I am afraid you are right on the track. Moreover I took the drive apart because I couldn't do anything with any software and I wasn't going to pay thousands of dollars to a data recovery company. I discovered that the platters are locked and out of alignment. I did manage to loose them up enough so they spin when a machine is turned on. I used a hammer to do that and also I hit the had once to hard Anyways now the platters are spinning but the head its hitting corners back and forth. So now I am looking for the head to replace. This looks more like a science project, I have pretty much dealt with data being hell out