Dead HDD, How to recovery Data

[mrwinky]

I've got a friend who called me up the other day, complaining her pc wont boot. She has a 10+ year old Compaq desktop that when she powers it on, sits at a blank screen after post. At first she wanted me to fix the pc, I convinced her it was time to get something new, she had been talking for awhile about getting a laptop. So she brought in the desktop to her work, I pulled the Hard drive out (40gig WD, IDE) and brought it home, put it in my external enclosure, and stuck it on my laptop. I can see the drive, but it tells me its corrupt or unreadable when I try to click on it. I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a free utility that i can try to recover the data off of it. I tried to ghost the drive and open the image in ghost explorer but that didnt work. I've seen a few utility's out there, but everyone wants me to buy a key after scanning the drive. So I thought I would ask here if anyone could recommend something.


Winky

[bionicbadger]

freezer trick?

[Haz]

It really depends what the issue is with the drive. I've done recoveries with Getdataback (not really free) and with a Live Linux CD.

[RunnerForDeals]

I've got a friend who called me up the other day, complaining her pc wont boot. She has a 10+ year old Compaq desktop that when she powers it on, sits at a blank screen after post. At first she wanted me to fix the pc, I convinced her it was time to get something new, she had been talking for awhile about getting a laptop. So she brought in the desktop to her work, I pulled the Hard drive out (40gig WD, IDE) and brought it home, put it in my external enclosure, and stuck it on my laptop. I can see the drive, but it tells me its corrupt or unreadable when I try to click on it. I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a free utility that i can try to recover the data off of it. I tried to ghost the drive and open the image in ghost explorer but that didnt work. I've seen a few utility's out there, but everyone wants me to buy a key after scanning the drive. So I thought I would ask here if anyone could recommend something.


Winky

If the data is valuable you should just buy the software and recover it. Safest and simplest way. If it isn't important and you are just "trying" for the heck of it then you can use winhex (free version) and recover the blocks of data yourself. Remember though you will need to know the block legth and try and repiece the data together yourself. VERY VERY hard to do.

If you are looking to buy software I recommend Object Rescue

http://www.objectrescue.com/

[EP32k2]

I use zero assumption recovery. Works great as long as the drive is working. Corrupted or not this program will recover whatever data is on the drive.