Does anyone know of a decent hard drive recovery program?

[Funkosapien]

Main thing I want to know is does anyone know of a decent hard drive recovery program. Im asking because with these sort of things Im a bit suss on not quite scrupulous individuals/companies that appear when searching for such things and its usually a better idea to ask people for a program theyve already had good experiences with.

I keep getting 'cyclic redundancy check's on random files and while Ive even tried putting the HD in a external casing so it can run chkdsk and defrag on one of my other comps on sectors it normally can not Im still seeing a 'cyclic redundancy check' error on random files and there are several bad sectors it dont seem to want to fix.

Im gonna simply put in a new HD but I was wondering is that HD salvagable so I can reuse it for other purposes? And does anyone know of a program that is similiar yet more effective than chkdsk?

Ive also got another HD that dropped from a few feet thats fooked and has got the 'click of death' on it. Im gonna try getting a identical HD and replacing the HD arm and circuit board within a dust proof cabinet Ill build then throwing it. Anyone know of a easier or better way to accomplish getting that data off as theres a bunch of stuff on there I want and thats a rather tedious process and quite risky as it may kill the hd.

Thanks Guys.

Cya.

 

[tomatthe]

It's not likely that any program will be able to read the bad sectors.

I would never under any circumstances use that drive after you have gotten off all the data you can recover. Chkdsk should mark the bad sectors as unusable, but it's just asking for problems if you try to keep using the drive.

I have never replaced anything on an HD, so can't really even offer an opinion on that one.

 

[Andy5112405]

When you say a dust free enclosure, it needs to be dust free to particles less than a micron - ecer seen the film Disclosure with Michael Douglas. It was all about a drive company having too many drive failures because of inadequate filtering of the "clean air".

I tried swapping the PCBs on two identical Western Digital drives and that didnt work. Swapping the boards back did work. Both boards were identical with identical part numbers ?

 

[nordlead]

Paying someone to physically fix a HDD so you can reuse it will cost WAY more than just buying a new HDD. Also, no software program can fix a failing HDD. Once it starts failing it is going to die soon and there is no stopping it. Best to move on to a new HDD.

If you need to do emergency data recovery there are two things that most people can do. The first is the "freezer trick". Stick the HDD in the "freezer trick". You put the HDD in the freezer and then once it is cold put it in your PC to read off some data. Basically it is for HDDs that are failing to spin and sometimes gets them to spin for a few minutes. The other is swapping out the controller cards. These have to be identical cards (make, model, revision, firmware) and it is easy to do. Swapping the cards only helps with controller issues, not corrupt data issues. Doing much more than that isn't practical unless you have access to a real clean room. If you happen to be so lucky, then give it a try.

As for paid data recovery, I would never purchase a cheap piece of software for it since it won't work. There are specialized data recovery experts but you can expect to pay thousands of dollars to recover the data. If your data is really that valuable, then I'm going to have to say that you should have had a backup. You can google some services and they will send you a quote. I've never used them because they are so expensive so I have no suggestions.

The moral of the story: Properly backing up data is far cheaper than trying to recover it after the fact.

 

[Funkosapien]

Yeh Ive got a new tezza HD sitting there ready to go but its a 500gig so dident want to waste it unless necessary. Was not sure if it was possible to get a proggy to get it to ignore fooked sectors as there dont appear to be more popping up so there'd not be a bit of grit logically.

yeh I know Id need a clean room to do it properly. But I saw a vid on youtube of some guy that made a glass walled enclosure for doing exactly that with some filters and fans on either side and cables already in case and he threw out hd directly after recovering data so was gonna at least try it.

And yeh the hard drive recovery companies are heinously expensive. But its making the 'click of death' and Ive heard thats at least 75% of time the hd arm readhead being dirty and being unable to read data. That'd also explain the HD being detected but not any of the files on it. And yeh I was gonna try the cards first.

And yeh there is some stuff on there I definitely want. Many many hours of work and some other stuff thats non replaceable. And yeh I did have some of it backed up. And Ive been meaning to get some more HD's to make double or even triple backups eventually but got other more critical expenses higher on the list of priorities.

However as youve said a simple hard drive recovery program will not suffice. Thank You for your assistance.

 

[yasir siddiqui]

yup, i used a software and i get all my lost data again.
so you can try and get back your all data..

"Get data back"

http://download.cnet.com/GetDataBack-Data-Recovery/3000-2094_4-10061631.html

 

[Funkosapien]

Ill look at that a bit later got a few other things I need to do first. Thanks man.

 

[Funkosapien]

Best answer selected by Funkosapien.

 

[Maziar]

This topic has been closed by Maziar