OT Hard Drive recovery

[Spiffyguy]

Has anyone ever had any luck recovering data of a dead hard drive? My wife's computer died yesterday. The drive is giving off a SMART error. I popped in a new drive and installed windows. I can see the other drive but not read it. Windows error "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable" I would like to try to recover the data if possible. Think she has some kid pictures and such. I hate to pay a ton of cash though. Any ideas on some decent free software?

Thanks

oh it is win xp, 40 gb drive

 

[babybull]

That happened to us also. The computer guy at my wifes work somehow saved the pics onto a disk for us. Do not know how he did it but we were greatful. I wish I could be more help. Paul

 

[Spiffyguy]

i back up all my stuff on a 1 TB network storage. My wife just never got around to using it......I guess. She did have a data drive though and that is still working good. I am just not sure what is on the boot drive.

 

[breutus]

there are a lot of HD recovery programs but if its a physical error its gonna be pricey to get off there.

The easiest way to probably handle it is reformat the drive with a quick NTFS then run a file recovery software on the disk.

other than that the HD programs will attempt to look at it despite the error but there hit and miss

 

[Spiffyguy]

I am trying a free program from disk internals right now. It is free to show what is recoverable. if you want to get the data then they charge you lol. But at least it will show if anything might be retrievable.

 

[Markk96]

have you ran checkdisk on it?

 

[Spiffyguy]

yeah the drive is in bad shape. it may work once it is reformatted and all that. I just need to get the data off. This one program i used yesterday says there is recoverable stuff but I don't want to pay 100 bucks right now to get it. There must be a decent freeware out there. Just need to find it.

 

[fazgood]

Spiffy,

This guy has a great list of free software that is tested to be free of malware. Look under disk and file tools. I am not sure those will fix a partition table but they might be worth a look. You can post on thier forum and request if anyone knows of a free hard drive recovery program.

Faz

 

[buddy381]

i've used a program called isobuster.....i think it was 30 bucks, but there might be a demo or free version....i used it to get data off of a dvd that was somehow bad from the video camera.....it worked great. I have not tried it on a HD though. consider yourself lucky though...i had a hard drive go out and it happened to be a physical error.....i am usually pretty good at backing up but hadn't in a few months....i lost my son's first birthday pics and videos.....my wife wanted to kill me!!

 

[fazgood]

Maybe a link would help...

http://www.techsupportalert.com/

Faz