Recovering a damaged HDD

[Cranked]

So, I have a 100gb hdd in my pc that I use for storing photos and music. Well, the other day it just stopped working and everytime I click on it, it says something about it not being formatted. I was going to try and do data recovery on it and see if that would get at least some of the files back for me, but I don't know what the best software is to use out there. So, does anyone have a suggestion for a software to use to recover data that is good? Obviously, free would be better than paying, but I don't even know where to start and I am not opposed to paying for something that will actually work.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Put it in a bag then put it in the freezer overnight then give it a try, it might work enough for you to copy off your important stuff.

 

[Jared Twomey]

first thing I always do is run SpinRite from grc.com. Unfortunately it's not a cheap program, but over the few years I have had it is has saved me enough times to pay for itself.

 

[BuddyBoy]

Be clear, do you simply have a corrupted file system, or are the sectors on the disk unreadable, or do you have both problems? For the former, you can use a data recovery package; I've had good experience with R-Studio. If the drive is unreadable, try the freezer trick, that has worked for me in the past when I had failing laptop drive. If the freezer trick makes the disk readable, but the file system is corrupted, you will need to use the two together.

 

[Cranked]

Be clear, do you simply have a corrupted file system, or are the sectors on the disk unreadable, or do you have both problems? For the former, you can use a data recovery package; I've had good experience with R-Studio. If the drive is unreadable, try the freezer trick, that has worked for me in the past when I had failing laptop drive. If the freezer trick makes the disk readable, but the file system is corrupted, you will need to use the two together.

I don't know exactly what the problem is. Everytime I try to click on the drive from "My Computer", it kinda locks up the computer for a minute then tells me the drive isn't formatted. I think I will try the "freezer trick" first then go from there.

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[BuddyBoy]

If possible, use the Event Viewer to see if you were getting hardware errors reading the disk. Otherwise, there are vendor-supplied standalone DOS utilities that you can use to diagnose the disk, such as SeaTools for Seagate drives. Other vendors should have similar diagnostic tools available for download from their site. There are also "boot disks" floating around that have multiple vendor tools on them, which you can choose from at boot time.

 

[TheForce]

I just recovered a defunct hard drive last week. It was my fault! I accidentally reformatted a good drive loaded with 440Gb of video project files. I guess even I can do something really stupid once in awhile.

I have "File Scavenger" You can download it and see if the files will be recoverable for free but to do the recover you have to pay. I buy the cheapest license which is $49 and unlock the software. The let 'r rip for a long time to a new hard drive.

Assume your drive is electrically OK and just the file system is corrupt.

I find it best to use a spare fast computer because the drive discovery / recovery could take more than a day.

It works with USB connected drives too.

One bit of warning- DO NOT attempt to experiment with the drive before attempting the most exhaustive and longest test search for defunct files. The more you play with the drive the more you may screw up any chance of recovery.



check it out at: Harddrive / hard disk / floppy disk data recovery software

 

[Jared Twomey]

I am dealing with this tonight as well for a friend. Her desktop has stopped booting. It gets about halfway through the startup process and it blue screens. I ran SpinRite on it and it booted fine. I told her to back all her stuff up and we are going to replace the drive.

The other drive I am working on now is for a photographer friend o f mine who hasn't backed up these photos he is working on. The drive is doing something similiar to what you are saying. In windows it looks like a blank drive. I am using ubuntu on my laptop and so I did some googling around to find a linux program to try to recover the partition table.
I found a free program called TestDisk that is doing an amazing job. It scanned the drive, found all of the partitions that used to be on the disk, I selected the 1 I wanted, and it showed me the folder tree, and I selected the folders I needed... it is copying the files back as I type this. So if you happen to have a linux box, or an old machine you can throw ubuntu on, give TestDisk a try. I am very happy with its results... and its free.