Harddrive Crash - Data Recovery?

[Agent_Embryo]

The GF's dad lost his drive today, and with it alot of important data. The drive's a WD 80Gb drive, and has the click-of-death sounds in it. The computer can't find the drive anymore I think. Is there any way to recover the data in a manner that won't cost alot?

I guess it pays to have a backup system huh...better start planning one I suppose...my next computer must needs have raid.

[AgentCrypto]

The GF's dad lost his drive today, and with it alot of important data. The drive's a WD 80Gb drive, and has the click-of-death sounds in it. The computer can't find the drive anymore I think. Is there any way to recover the data in a manner that won't cost alot?

I guess it pays to have a backup system huh...better start planning one I suppose...my next computer must needs have raid.

search P2P for a App called EnCase
one of my favorite tools

try to get the old version off P2P
because the new versions use crypto USB keys to prevent piracy

[Bill in SD, CA]

Have you run diagnostics on the drive?

Disk Manager & Software Downloads - All Manufacturers

Bill

[elroy]

I had good luck with this program, Magic Recovery Pro. They have a demo so you can try it out prior to buying. It may show what can be recovered before you pay any $$.
http://www.software-recovery.com/
However if the drive has mechanical problems you may be out of luck. You do know not to write anything to the bad drive and recover files to another drive, right?
After having partition tables evaporate and losing data I now keep a 2nd drive in my pc and back up everything. There are some good backup programs out there that are free. It is well worth the cost of a 2nd drive. Currently I use Acronis True Image. Not free but great program. It makes compressed backups that you can mount just like the original drive.

[rabidaardvark]

Just slaving a drive will often let you get the data off. I'm not 100% sure as to the technical reasons but I would guess it has to do with not needing the registry or OS anymore so it doesn't need to be as stable.

[ArcticFox]

My grandmother's daughter's boyfriend's son's sister used this...

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

To get her data off a dead drive recently. I was told it took about three days of continuous running but was able to get most of the stuff off. I'd recommend that.

[Fr4gm4n]

My grandmother's daughter's boyfriend's son's sister used this...

Rofl

[FatalException]

Also, if none of the above utilities work and the data is valuable enough, you may want to consider a paid data recovery solution like sending the drive to Ontrack's data labs. Since the drive doesn't sound like it's been through a fire or submerged in water or anything, the fee shouldn't be TOO high... worth a try if the quote is free, right?

Ontrack is the company NASA used to recover data from the space shuttle Columbia's flight computer's hard drive - the drive was apparently scorched and had fallen many tens of thousands of feet. The impressive thing - they got almost all of the data back from the disk.

www.ontrack.com

[Dj-Icer]

My grandmother's daughter's boyfriend's son's sister used this...

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

To get her data off a dead drive recently. I was told it took about three days of continuous running but was able to get most of the stuff off. I'd recommend that.

That's definately a family tree


Yeah, I found that site time ago too and try it on my Western Digital and Maxtor. But the drive won't spin/ON or even working. Firstly, my pc was unable to get it running and of course, the pc can't detect it. Can I still save the data?

[nonobaddog]

I had a crash recently and Windows XP Pro could not see the drive at all. I was able to get almost all of the data copied off to a different FAT32 drive using a Knoppix boot CD.