Laptop landed butter side down & I got the 0xc00000e9 error for the hard drive. Can I pull stuff off

Factual Questions
1

Last night my laptop slapped the hardwood floor and after a lot of attempting to turn it on and off, I closed the lid and pushed it out to sea. Well, not really. Well, it turns out that the Hard Drive was the problem as I got the 0xc00000e9 error on the laptop but I’m able to install Linux through the CD drive.

I pulled the hard drive out and I’ve got one of those things (can’t remember what they’re called) that is externally connecting to a computer via USB but can slap a hard drive in there like an Atari cartridge and boot it up.

Well, I did that and the desktop computer found the drives (yes, it found the main drive and the partitioned back up). I got excited. I clicked on them but was prompted to format the drive first. Since that would defeat the purpose of salvaging the data, I stopped.

So the question is, can I pull the data off of that hard drive or is it hosed?

2

The first thing to do is to duplicate it if you have another like drive. Then run CHKDSK /F against it.

3

You can’t, no. But there are data recovery services that almost certainly can - depend on how dearly you want the data back.

4

Maybe, maybe not.

The advice from Quartz to try and clone the drive is a good one. The fact that the drive can see a partition is good but does not tell us much about the overall health of the drive over the next few hours or days if a home or typical computer shop recovery is attempted.

If you have another drive to try and clone to its not a bad idea unless you have really valuable data in which case do not futz with it, pack it up and ship it to drivesavers or a similar service.

5

Total WAG but is the drive encrypted or something? What OS did you have on it?

Can you mount the drive in linux(you said you were able to boot)?

A professional recovery service will run you around one or two thousand dollars assuming best case scenario, just for info purposes.

6

The drive wasn’t encrypted and was running Windows 7. I reinstalled the hard drive on the laptop in Linux but it won’t open it either. (I also installed the German version by mistake so my rusty language skills might have me missing something there.)

I’ve tried cloning it but no luck so far. As far as a data recovery, I’m not sure if thatd be worth it. I had just backed up all my music last week to external hard drives and the only big thing left was a couple pictures and my book collection that I can redown load but was just nicely organized.

7

Perhaps try PhotoRec. It’s designed to recover files from broken partitions. Despite its name, it can recover much more than just photos.

The same people make TestDisk, but that will only recover the partition to the same most likely failing disk. Photorec will copy the files to another location.

(Yes, that’s a wiki. And wikis make sense for open source projects like this one. It just means the website is open source, too.)