Need To Copy Data From "unknown" Formatted Hard Drive

Hi, not really related to Windows "per se", but since it has something to do with the formatting....OK, I have installed a hard drive for my brother's Playstation 2 gaming system. It has worked for a long time until recently. The hard drive started to have that click of death sound. It still works and all, so I took it out before any more damage will be done to it. The problem now is that I can't get any of the games out of it. I want to copy all those games to my computer and then back to a new hard drive if possible. Otherwise, it will literally take him days to put all those games back again.Anyone has experience with this before or perhaps know of a program that can read all formats and copy the data over to my computer? The Device Manager will see that Playstation 2 hard drive but it will NOT show up in My Computer. I checked the Computer Management area and it prompted me to format it since it couldn't recognize the file format it was using. I already tried Norton Ghost, but to no avail since it too can not see it.Thanks.

I'm not sure if it can read it since i don't know what format playstation uses, but Paragon Drive Backup can do alot of things i haven't been able to with other programs. I would say the easiest would be to clone the hard drive onto a spare one, and Paragon can do that. Possibly other programs too, but i wouldn't know for sure.

Yeah cloning it to another healthy drive sounds like a good idea, because the more you mess with the drive the worse it may get and damage the data. Then you can mess with the good one as much as you want.I don't know what format the PS2 uses.

Thanks for the replies. I was just trying to back those files up to my current external hard drive first. I need to find a blank/clean hard drive in that case to do the cloning.Hope this program works

try this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDD_Utility_Disc

 

xboxrulz

Yeah, cloning the disk should work. I did that to a computer that had a hard drive going bad in it. Obviously, this is different, but cloning is the only good option you have (not dragging folders & files to Windows and then place on a new drive).[N]F

@xboxrulz: Does that HDD Utility Disc program come with the Sony hard drives? The one I have is a regular Maxtor one that I bought separately. That program seems to only format it for a first time use though...don't want to do that here since my brother's games are still all in there.I'm going to get a spare blank hard drive to do this soon.Side question (related in a way)...Is it possible to do the cloning via USB 2.0 instead of IDE? I have those USB enclosure drives and want to use my laptop to do this. Always curious if ghosting using USB would work. I know it will be much slower than if it was using IDE

Google Search found this :

Link 1 : HDClone 3.1

Link 2 : Clone/Backup a HDD under windows.

Link 3 : DriveClone 2

Hope this helps. I dont own any Gaming devices so i wouldent know the specifics.

Regards
Dhanesh.

@xboxrulz: Does that HDD Utility Disc program come with the Sony hard drives? The one I have is a regular Maxtor one that I bought separately. That program seems to only format it for a first time use though...don't want to do that here since my brother's games are still all in there.
I'm going to get a spare blank hard drive to do this soon.

Side question (related in a way)...Is it possible to do the cloning via USB 2.0 instead of IDE? I have those USB enclosure drives and want to use my laptop to do this. Always curious if ghosting using USB would work. I know it will be much slower than if it was using IDE

I dunno, I think so.

I don't have a PS2, so I don't know.

xboxrulz

Side question (related in a way)...Is it possible to do the cloning via USB 2.0 instead of IDE? I have those USB enclosure drives and want to use my laptop to do this. Always curious if ghosting using USB would work. I know it will be much slower than if it was using IDE

Paragon will do it. Of course, it's not freeware. I've had a hard time finding a cloning utility that let you do live clones. I've cloned a full 80 GB drive via USB in about 21/2 hours. You can also use it to image the partition into a backup file stored on your regular computer, and once you have the new hard disk, just restore the full thing onto the new drive.

@Grafitti: So Paragon won't wipe out the second hard drive that I want to save the image to right? I still didn't get to do the cloning yet since I don't have a blank hard drive. But if Paragon can do this without deleting all my data from one of my current hard drives, then I can use one of those instead.

OK, thought I would give Norton Ghost a shot, but that failed. I connected my bad hard drive as master and a blank hard drive as slave. I tried to choose the option to do a disk to disk copy but got this error message:

 

Error. there is no valid Source Drive to choose (11032)

 

I tried switching it so the master is the good hard drive and the bad one is set to slave, but still a no-go.

 

I just had something that came to mind. Does it matter if I set the jumpers on cable select for both? It should auto-detect what they are connected as with more recent computers right? This computer was built by me about a year ago using a AMD chipset.

 

Will try giving Paragon a try if no one else has any other suggestions...

Since it's not freeware, I'd suggest you ask some qualified technician if it can do it (copying a playstation disk) before you go and spend cash on it. You can back up the disk or selected partitions on it to an image file stored on your existing drive, while you can then write back to a blank hard disk once you get it.

Here's a screenshot. With the C partition selected I have the option to create an image of the logical disk, and if i select the drive i get the option to create an image of the entire disk

or you can download a Hard drive "RAW" reader...it just looks for files that are on the Hard drive...and should be able to copy that to an external harddrive.... or try using a undeleter/unformatter software....find one that scans the hard drive using sectors and it should find the files and give you the option to restore them to a different location...i hope that helps(and there are several freeware software solutions out there...you just have to look...and in the right places!)

Edited February 22, 2007 by cmosads (see edit history)

OK, Paragon didn't work either. It sees the hard drive as with all the other programs I tested with, but all it sees is unallocated data.Shouldn't the Ghost bootdisk be able to copy this "unallocated" data over to my other blank hard drive? I assume not since none of these are seeing it properly.