Data Recovery from a damaged hard drive

Have you tried the software from R-studio? It saved my bacon several times.

 

do a search for data recovery software - going to a company to recover it will empty your wallet (they charge by the byte!)

 

I had a corrupted drive on a Dell PC so I installed a new HD and loaded Windows on the new drive but Windows could not find the old drive at all. It was still there humming away but it was unrecognizable to the OS. R-studio not only could see the drive but I could selectively recover any file on it. Worked like a charm. I think it cost $80.

 

You might also try Spin-rite to repair the bad sector. It also works when the drive doesn't show up on "My Computer"

 

R-studio has a demo you can download that will do everything the full package does except recover files bigger than 64k. Try the demo to see if it can see your data.

http://www.r-studio.com/

 

Sonds like a bargain! I've not looked into this lately but you are right in that it would be $200 well spent (especially now that you have found the software solution fails )

Good luck!

 

I know it's too late for this, but if you don't have a DVD Burner, get one.
You can get one that burns 4.7GB of data for $40.00 if you look around.

http://salescircular.com/

Take it from me - I learned almost the hard way about a month ago. My HD was failing, but it gave me advance warning.
I'm a Tech, so I can reload everything OS-wise, but if you lose music and videos, those you cannot get back.

And if it's important - burn TWO copies in case one of the DVD's goes bad (it happens).

Luke - as a LAST resort - if you have given up and have no real shot at getting the data back, try and reload the OS IF you can. If you have the original discs, if it allows you to boot from the CD and choose the 'repair' option, go for it. Remember, this is as a last resort. You do NOT want to format anything if it asks you.
You will need to go into the BIOS or CMOS and select it to boot from CD and not the HD.

 

FileRecovery Pro, R-Studio, and R-Undelete are what i've used before. they all work well.

 

Let me introduce some of you to something called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks). There's tons of info out there in places like wikipedia to read up on it, but basically it involves adding extra drives to add redundancy to your data so you can survive a failure like this. Many new computers (last 2 years or so) have this capability built-in, all you have to do is add an extra drive, set it up (which really isn't that hard) and it will automatically mirror your data on both drives every time you write something. There are more advanced levels that reduce the penalty from 50% of your purchased hard drives to 1/3 or less, but I don't want to go too far for starters... There are also some modified files you can put into your Windows XP installation that will unlock this capability which is actually built-in. Check your computer documentation.
This is what my friends and I use to provide a level of protection for our movie/music collections. It still won't help if your house catches fire, or you have a lightning strike, but its also a lot less cumbersome than burning 300+GB of data onto DVDs for 2 weeks straight!

 

Sorry the SW couldn't help you. Hope the data recovery company can get it back for you.

 

Just to clarify, RAID and backups aren't the same thing. RAID is a real-time process, where the data is written to both/all drives at once. If a drive fails, the remaining drive continues to function.

A lot of newer motherboards support RAID in hardware; if yours does, that's preferable to doing it through software as it's more reliable and faster.

 

Yes, but you can also install the removable HD 'trays' and slap a HD into one, Have your OS on one drive, have your 'data' HD as a secondary, and have the third swappable HD there as well, and periodically run a batch command to copy the entire contents of your data drive to your swappable HD, yank it, and put in another one. Just rotate the two swappables you have. Or just buy two external USB drives.
Personally, I have a file server in my home, and I periodically just copy stuff over to it, let it copy while I'm away from the computer, etc.

Getting into RAID might be getting into more technically challenging stuff than people have time for, especially the recovery process.

 

learn from the mistakes of others, wish I had. last October my HD crashed hard! the writing arm broke and scored the drive, I was expecting a 4k bill if they could recover the data. I had 2yrs of R&D and my business on that drive. result: Gone - nothing recoverable! hard way to learn about backing up your HD. still recovering from the loss, and I'll never get all that info back. biggest loss is the digi pics of my boys from the last 2yrs and the birth of the youngest. that crash almost put me out of business!