Urget help needed..hard drive broken! any reccomendations?

*Amy*_2 · 7 April 2009 at 9:44AM

Hiya my hard drive has stopped working and I need my work of there asap as I have deadlines end of next week! Does anyone know any data recovery site to reccomend me to use?

Thanks Amy

kwikbreaks · 7 April 2009 at 9:52AM

Well it obviously depends on what is the matter with it but I found that...

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

fixed a Seagate Freeagent drive for me which had somehow corrupted the partition table so it looked entirely empty.

Before you try to recover anything you should first attempt a sector by sector backup of the drive. There are lots of free tools around as well as paid for ones but there is no real guarantee that any will work.

*Amy*_2 · 7 April 2009 at 9:56AM

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Well it obviously depends on what is the matter with it but I found that...

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

fixed a Seagate Freeagent drive for me which had somehow corrupted the partition table so it looked entirely empty.

Before you try to recover anything you should first attempt a sector by sector backup of the drive. There are lots of free tools around as well as paid for ones but there is no real guarantee that any will work.

Hey sorry didnt mention that its an external hard drive, will it make a difference? I am not very sure about thr sector by sector back up? Sorry not very good at these things

XX

kwikbreaks · 7 April 2009 at 10:06AM

I guessed it would be because you didn't ask about how to boot the PC or replace the drive. Being an external drive makes it a whole lot easier.

Just do a google to find something free to backup the drive. It may be that you won't be able to - it depends on whether or not the bachup software can "see" the drive to back it up. I use Trueimage for backups but it isn't free.

You can start out by installing that recovery program I suggested though - don't let it update anything though until you have at least tried to backup what you have.

macman · 7 April 2009 at 10:19AM

Sorry if this is asking the obvious, but since it is on an external drive, do you not have a copy of the data on your primary hard disk. i.e. on the internal drive on your PC?