Typical hard-drive crash, but what are my options?

psycocommy

Junior Member
Jul 29, 2003
22
0
0
Right after I decided to get a DVD burner for back-up, my 80 gig external WD USB 2.0 drive, with all my media on it, crashed. When I plug it in, windows either does not recognize it and becomes extremely slow or does see it, but tells me it needs to be formatted. The red read light on the drive goes on and off steadily, as if its trying to start reading, but cannot. So, I was wondering:

1) Could the case at all be an issue? Meaning, does it make sense to waste time on buying a new USB 2.0 case and swapping them? I don't have a PC here, just a laptop, so I can't test it without a case.

2) VirtualLab demo version did recognize all of the files that were on the drive. However, its just doing this based on the FAT table, correct? So, is it possible that it can see where the files should be, but the files themselves are inaccesible?

3) What data recovery software do you recommend I use? It seems that data recovery companies are ridiculously expensive, so I doubt I could afford to ship it off to them. Are there any other options?

Thanks, I know this is a very typical problem, but first time for me... ;(
 

cholley

Senior member
Feb 16, 2002
725
0
76
www.zazzle.com
i would pull the drive out of the usb box, i do alot of data recovery and the drive has to be in real good shape to work with the usb, i would first just try to slave it in on your ide port, boot and see if you can get to your stuff, alot of times you can browse your drive and copy off most things when the drive is acting up.

most of the imaging software i have tried will crap out if the drive has errors also
 

Monster Rain

Junior Member
May 20, 2005
1
0
0
Once you get it connected as a slave, you can try to use Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro to rescue data. If you can find a copy, that is.

It should be able to retrieve data from a drive that has had its partition information wiped out.