need advice about audio data recovery from a win xp drive

[pinkjimiphoton]

apologies if this is the wrong forum...

recently, i moved all my in process work off onto a huge 1 tbyte drive to free up resources for a studio date producing another artist...
anyways, before i got a chance to restore stuff and back things up to dvd, i had two momentary brown outs.....and they cooked the file system of the drive.
so we used linux on a live distro, and started trying to recover data, a tedious process at best...and it seems some of the audio is fragmented and corrupt...
is there anyway to defrag the disc to make it easier to recover?
or am i stuck with what i get?
i can get it done commercially if need be, but first i wanna try and copy out what i can.

my music is a loss <snif.....at least to me> but the saddest loss is the 18 + gigs of music vaporware i have been accumulating in my archive, not including the 4 gigs of obscure vstis and even the shot i paid for.

losing pics of the fam will suck, too...
but all the stuff is there, it is all visible (not to windows) so i am hopeing for the best.

any suggestions that are constructive are welcome.

yah yah...spare me the backup backtalk, i am a fool and all...

that's a given.
what i really need here is advice on how best to salvage my shit!!!!

thanks in advance...
humour is welcome, so mod's please don;t lock this forum!!!
peace
jimi
----
What, Me Worry?

[Oren]

Jimi,

Welcome to the "tech zone". You have, indeed, come to the right place!

(a suggestion: word your posts with as little North American vernacular as possible. Most of our members have English as their second - or third -  language, and although they are very good, whacked-out figures of speech tend to elicit confused responses... )

One issue you may be dealing with is the fact that Linux data and Windoze data are stored entirely differently. Trying to pull Windoze files from a NTFS-formatted hard-drive with a Linux operating system is going to be counter-productive, dude...

Beyond that, I know very little, but the crew here will pitch in to get you out of the tall grass, forthwith.

Good to see you on the forum,

Oren.

[Moon]

Hi Jimi,

In fact, the thing you tried was a very good idea: it is possible to mount an XP drive to recupperate data. There are even Linux distros that are made to do this: just launch a crashed pc with a bootable Linux CD and access the drive and start copying to a USB drive or attached CD or DVD writter.

However, if the drive is corrupted, this won't work and you need to take a different approach.

I recently had a similar problem, not with a HD but with a USB stick. I bought a very usefull utility which was able to get the data from the corrupted USB stick. They also have a version to restore data from an NTFS formatted drive.

Here's the link: http://www.driverecovery.in/drive-recovery/ntfs-data-recovery.asp

This is what well get the job done. I don't say this is the best tool. There are a lot of utilities out there that are doing the job. Personnaly, I had a verry good result with there pen drive recovery tool, so I trust this will be a good one for HD's. Do check if the XP drive was NTFS formatted or FAT formatted so you get the right tool. I believe you can download a trial version before you buy this (trial version will not allow you to save the recovered data...)

Hopes this is usefull for you. Goof luck !

Moon

[Oren]

These two are open-source, and might do the job...

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec

The second one is mostly for visual files, but will recover OggVorbis, MP3, and wave files.

[folderol]

...and it seems some of the audio is fragmented and corrupt...
is there anyway to defrag the disc to make it easier to recover?

jimi
----
What, Me Worry?

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ATTEMPT TO DEFRAG

Sorry for the shouting, but do that and it's lost for good.

Can you get another drive of the same size?

IF so, try:
dd if=hda of=hdb

Assuming hda is the damaged drive and hdb is the new blank one. This should create an exact duplicate of the old drive that you can play about with as much as you like, without risk of damaging the other one any further (do make sure and double, trebble check you have the right drives).

I'm also assuming that the basic low-level format hasn't been damaged, just the file maps.