HELP! recover .JPGs from FAILING hard drive

[astromoose]

This is a laptop HD in a dell latitude D610.
It is a friends machine and I am trying to help him out. He has about 20 gigs worth of years of photos on this thing, with NO backups!

EDIT: running windows XP, NTFS file system. 80gig toshiba drive. I wish i could pull this drive out and hook it up to another computer!

Apparently data access started getting really slow, then the machine started blue screening. Now it won't even start booting.

I booted the machine off of a bartPE CD to try and copy the files to an external USB drive. It would copy a few images out of any given folder and then stall and come up with "cyclic redundancy error".
I tried using "getdataback" by runtime software and it would only stall.

I managed to get "easyrecovery 6 pro" by ontrack software to copy the files, but 4/5s of them won't open as images on another machine even though the files are there. can you think of anyway to reconstruct these?

I tried to make an image of the drive to try and recover from there, but acronis trueimage and drivesnapshot just stall out.

The weird thing is that in the bartPE environment it will let me copy a few files, then stall out on a few of them because of what i assume are bad sectors, only to let me copy more files further down the folder. is there some program that will just copy what images are intact and leave what is unreadable (in lieu of attempting to drag over one file at a time)??

or any other solutions or programs to recommend?

thanks for any help!

 

[redbeard1]

By all appearances the drive is dying. The drive is letting you access a few files and freezing up, a bad sign. If there is anything truly valuable on it, then you should stop trying to access it and send it to a recovery service. The more you use it in this state the greater the chance you have of damaging the contents beyond what a service can recover. If you are not up to spend $1500 or better for a recovery, then you can keep trying to copy a few files at a time, but getting everything you want is probably not going to happen.

I have not used this software, but it claims to do what you are seeking.

HDD Regenerator

 

[g8wayrebel]

Don't laugh , but if the drive is truly dying , there is a possible solution to get one last long spin out of it.
Wrap it several times in paper towels , then in plastic.
Place it in the fridge (to prevent condensation while cooling) for a while then the freezer.
Leave it in the freezer for a couple hours to get good and cold.
Make all preparations to do the copying then take it out and fire it up.
This can give you one last full spin from it if that is the problem.
If it is a sector problem , best of luck.