Hi

rite, my mates laptop HDD died (allong with the rest of the laptop, by the looks of it) So ive take the HDD out and got a 2.5 to 3.5 addapter to stick it on the IDE cable in my PC and try to recover her photos and music. What tools can i use to:

a) assess the HDD for damage, see if its physical or data, and highlight any bad areas etc

b) recover the data off the drive.

Cheers

I had a similar thing, windows picked it up and i could look at the files but if i tryed to copy anything off it would give CRC errors. i used Getdataback NTFS, got every file back. sometimes it needed to be turned off and on again (it was plugged in using an external drive) but it eventually worked

I havent lost any file as such. They are all there, Windows picks up the drive (which actually has 2 partitions, but only 1 was really used) and lists all the files. I can open some fine too. But whenever I try to copy the files off onto my PC I get CRC errors and the copying stops. I need to be able to get theses files off or clone the disk or something?

File Scavenger? Software - QueTek?

picked up on this software last week from these very forums, very good indeed and help me recover about 60GB of DATA from a friend's *borked* hard drive, they were so pleased they bought me a professional licence!

I have since been using it to peek through all my own hard drives and flash drives, shocking how much sensitive data is lurking!

I have now since found out about drive scrubbing (writing lots of zeros etc)

If the laptop disk is still working then old file scavenger will be able to find your files

Have you tried making sure that the drive is still operating in any shape or form? If you plug it in and it's totally dead then there's not much that can be done.

In answer to a) the best bet is going to be the drive manufacturer's own diagnostics which will be available from their site.

Have a search through the forum, there are a lot of recommendations for data recovery tools. Most of them have free trials to let you see if anything is recoverable before you shell out for the full thing.

The drive works. the laptop still booted, but with random crashes, file errors and a nice message when you booted that said something allong the lines of "System Disk Failure Iminent"

The Drive is a Seagate, Ill go have a look! cheers