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anyone know how to recover a hard drive?

Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2008 8:13 pm
by Xintyl
As some of you may know I have a new computer partly due to my old one's hard drive dying on me. There's a few files on that hard drive that I hadn't backed up (one of them being the book I was writing, doh) but it's not worth paying the £100 fee to get them back. Anyone on here know how to recover files from a dead hard drive?

Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 6:30 am
by Lorthania
If the hard drive is physically dead, you probably want to call Abby from NCIS :wink: .

Otherwise, hook it up to your old PC and boot from a Knoppix CD (or any decent Linux distro) and pray you can access the drive from in there. If you can, all you need to do is copy over the files to a USB stick.

If the data are corrupted, you are going to have to experiment with data recovery applications like Easy Recovery, File Scavenger, GetDataBack, R-Studio, Stellar, UFS Explorer or VirtualLab. I have no experience with any of these though, so use at own risk :).

Good luck!

Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:40 am
by Dervish
File scavenger is good, I use it often. But like Bart says you don't mention HOW your drive is dead. If it has blown up into a million pieces even Abby couldn't help you. Slaving it to a working machine may be enough, just add it to your new machine for long enough to recover the files if it spins up.

And get an NAS, that long-haired lover of yours will know what one of them is. :great:

Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 11:32 am
by Lorthania
Dervish wrote:If it has blown up into a million pieces even Abby couldn't help you.
Now that's just blasphemous :-)