Bad Luck/Next Steps...Help!

[mgrzTX]

So here's the story...I'm putting a PSU, GPU, etc into a friends computer and I (somewhat expectedly) kill the old very cheap Mobo. Of coarse all the data on his HDD is backed up (onto an HP HD5000s external HDD). Then, I have to go out of town for a while, said friend decides they can't wait and take the comp to someone else to install the new Mobo.

Dude doesn't quite have a grasp of what he's doing. Somehow, installs Mobo semi-correctly. And DESTROYS HDD! WTF?!?!? Ok, cool cool, got it backed up. I ask if we can get the HDD back so I can see what I can do with it. Nope, thrown out. Well anyway, a Day or 2 later I plug in the HP external into my computer and Windows 7 doesn't find the driver. I hope it's a problem w/ the case, so I take it out and put the bare drive into my comp. Windows recognizes it...YAY!...but when I try to initialize the disk I get the Data Error (cyclic redundancy check) error...BOOO!!!

This is where I'm at now. I've used SpinRite, but don't currently have the software available except through purchase. I can't use Windows 7 chkdsk because the drive isn't initialized yet. Basically I've delt w/ the error before but never w/ a disk that has yet to be initialized. So here's my question.

Do you continue on my own personal campaign to get the data back (Pictures and Music) trying other software etc. and ask ya'll if you know of a software package that can recover/deem dead the non-initialized HDD. Or do I just take it to a professional data recovery place (friend says it's worth the $$$$) now? Also, if no one knows the answer but knows a place where the question is better posed that would be welcome as well.

Thanks ya'll

 

[treefrog07]

Last week I successfully recovered two 500GB WDs in RAID 1 after thoroughly corrupting the partition tables and the MBR using TestDisk, a free program (DOS-based).
-- Download and install it on the computer you will use to recover the HDD.
-- Then install the bad HDD in your computer,
-- load windows,
--run TestDisk.
It'll bring up a DOS-like window allowing you to select the bad HDD. The instructions are on the same webpage as the download.
If your recovery computer has sufficient space available, you can even recover and save those files to your computer's HDD.

 

[mgrzTX]

Last week I successfully recovered two 500GB WDs in RAID 1 after thoroughly corrupting the partition tables and the MBR using TestDisk, a free program (DOS-based).
-- Download and install it on the computer you will use to recover the HDD.
-- Then install the bad HDD in your computer,
-- load windows,
--run TestDisk.
It'll bring up a DOS-like window allowing you to select the bad HDD. The instructions are on the same webpage as the download.
If your recovery computer has sufficient space available, you can even recover and save those files to your computer's HDD.

Thanks for the response I'll give it a try and post how it goes!

 

[mgrzTX]

I tried TestDisk, and I go through all the instructions, and now it's says this...

Read error at 1/232/40 <lba=30720>

I'm not quite sure if it's still running or not, but if it is it's going slower than slow and won't be done for like years.

Edit: Ok, it's still running but like I said sloooooowwww.

And the read error keeps changing, now it's at 5/232/40 etc...

 

[treefrog07]

There is an example of recovering a formatted disk on the TestDisk homepage. While it is running, read through that. I'm assuming you are in "Quick Search." "Deeper Search" took a while, but there were two primary partitions, and the HDD was about 75% full, with an OS partition and a data partition. It successfully identified both parititions and let me save the recovered files I really wanted to keep. In the end, it restored the partition tables, all the files, and the MBR. At that point, I loaded the HDD and restarted the computer, it went straight to booting into XP.