Can I recover data from a drive that no longer is detected and won't boot?

[Arkitech]

Sunday night I think there was a power surge or a spike in my house because all of my PCs (in different rooms) were either off or reset. I tried to reboot my main rig and I received a "disk read error occurred" message. I thought initially that maybe the BIOS had been reset, to make a long story short it turns out that the drive got damaged. After installing a new hard drive I tried to access the damaged one by installing it in a USB encloure, Vista recognizes that a drive is present but it's not visible within Disk Manager. So I'm assuming I need to purchase some kind of recovery software to try to view and recover the data.

Are there any programs that are better suited for recovering data from damaged drives?

 

[krnmastersgt]

I'm quite frankly surprised that only your hard drive in 1 system was damaged and nothing else. No surge/UPS connected to your main rig? There's a few free data recovery programs floating around out there, never had to use it myself since I just back everything up, have you tried connecting the HD to other systems and see if they can connect to it? Might get lucky.

 

[shrumpage]

My guess is the drive is physically fine by the data is all screwy, which is good news for recovery. I was in a similar situation as you. Just download various free/demo recovery software find the one that will actually work for your drive. Pay for the full version.

I ended up using r-studio, it was under a hundred bucks and the only package i found that could recover the data.

 

[Fardringle]

I have had very good results with GetDataBack. I used it a few weeks ago to recover the files from a drive where almost the entire MFT/MBR portion of the drive was damaged.

As shrumpage said, try the free demo versions of a few programs to see which are able to read the data on the drive, then pay for the full version to actually recover the files.

 

[Arkitech]

Well I tried all the suggestions in the thread so far but nothing has worked yet. In fact the only program that came close to even seeing the drive was R-Studio. It sees that I have a device attached to my USB enclosure but it can't make out any details of the drive.

Under Disk Management, Vista shows the drive as unknown and unreadable. After seeing that I downloaded the WD diagnostic program and tried to scan the drive but it does'nt show up in that utility either. At this point I'm not sure what to do.


Any suggestions on other programs that might help?

 

[RebateMonger]

It isn't going to directly help recover the data, but you might try burning a Seagate's Seatools diagnostics boot CD to check out the drive, too, just to see what it says about the drive. I just used Seatools to test a Western Digital drive and, much to my surprise, it will do the test even though it's the wrong brand of drive. Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test should also work with the WDC drive.

I suggest you DO NOT allow those drive testers to do a "repair" of the drive. Just do a quick test and see what they say about the drive. Warning: If you have a physically failing drive, the more you run it the more damage that can be done to it. But I get the feeling that the surge has already done its damage.

 

[Laputa]

It's likely an electrical issue, so likely any software attempt will not resolve the issue. Find a right replacement board for this drive and you are likely to have a better luck. If the board is shorted or fried and you have one of those ROM on the board drives, only the pros can get it. Hopefully the ROM is on the disc surfaces for your drive. Good luck.

And the answer is yes, you can recovery the data on this drive provided the right method was attempted.

 

[Vikroda]

I have a similar problem. A colleague's laptop's drive suddenly failed. I connected it to an external enclosure but no drive was recognized - though it sounds like it spinning just fine. I bought an adapter to connect it directly to my IDE controller but still there was no drive recognized so none of the software tools can do anything. I haven't tried to replace the circuit board (I don't know if we have the exact same model HDD floating around).

Do you guys think we'll have to send it to a data recovery vendor?

 

[Laputa]

Likely yes for sending it if you guys don't know what you are doing or not sure what you are doing.