recovering a laptop HD?

[Biggerhammer]

So, like most of you, I am the neighborhood geek. One of my wife's coworkers has a Tecra 8200 with a 20G Travelstar drive. The drive, like many of its brethren, died an untimely death. It took all her tax data with it.

Symptoms: drive stops working midway through booting into Win98. I can hear it 'trying', going through about a six second cycle of trying to read from bad sectors.

My steps so far:
[*]Freezer trick: drive suddenly goes from stopping during Windows load to not being recognized as having an OS at all.
[*]Knoppix: locks up during load because it can't write to the disc
[*]Swearing: So far, this is the most effective tactic.

IBM in its distinctly finite wisdom does not have any disc tools that I could find. Seagate's seatools finds some bad sectors but can't figure out what to do with them, apart from mentioning that they exist.

What would you do next? I'd really like to get this thing fixed for her for long enough to save her tax data, if possible.

 

[bruceb]

Did you try putting that drive in another pc or an external enclosure to see if you can read
or recover the personal data ? ?

You may also need some data recovery software
This program is said to be very good, but not free

http://www.runtime.org/

There may be other ones that are free .. not sure
... however, once you own it, it is yours
for future use

 

[Biggerhammer]

I pulled it from the laptop, dusted off the old 2.5 -> 3.5 adapter and bought Handy Recovery, which has handily recovered one file. I bought it but their e-commerce system tells me they can take 24 hours to deliver the code... argh. Well, at least I know that I will be able to get this done tomorrow, and the owner has the tax files that she really needed.