Hard Drive Failure

[nd4vr]

My father got hit by a virus and it locked him out of his hard drive. He went and purchased a new PC and a cable that has USB on one end and a adapter on the other turned his previous hard drive into a external hard drive. However when he hooked it up it said it was corrupted. Is there anyway to recover this data? He has a ton of pictures and word documents that he needs and they are only on the original HD. Thank you for any help.

 

[x Heavy]

Send the bad drive to a data recovery service. It will be quite expensive with no gaurantee.

Hooking the infected drive to another computer was a bad idea IMHO.

I had a experience where we recieved a father's main hard drive during probate and I booted via command line, one at a time until Blaster showed up.

At that point there is no further point. Which probably answered a basic question as to why he was having computer problems the year prior to his death.

I will not want to say it much, but this testifys to the need to copy and backup anything to keep on another drive or DVD.

With that said, your future repairs should include a router and a good firewall/antivirus software. Yes I know the annual subscription is a pain, but it should prevent a re-infection risk a large percentage.

 

[fzabkar]

If your drive has a logical problem, then you don't need a data recovery service.

The safest approach would be to disable autorun on the target PC to prevent any malware on the external drive from automatically installing itself on the PC.

Next, try to run an antivirus program against the infected drive.

If the file system corruption is such that the AV software can't see any files, then try some data recovery freeware. However, I would suggest cloning the infected drive, sector-by-sector, and then working on the clone.