Best free recovery software?

[thaghost101]

Ohai

I have an older computer sitting around that i use for storage, And unfortunately one of the hard drives clonked out, And me throwing a screw driver and an xbox 360 controller at it after probably didn't help much (I know, I need help.)

Anyways, A few months later i noticed that this same hard drive has a major part of my music collection that i cannot replace because i don't know most of the artists, They were mostly radio rips.

Long story short: Whats the best free data recovery software out there for IDE hard drives? Possibly with the features to recover from damaged drives

 

[fzabkar]

Clone your drive sector-by-sector using a tool that knows how to work around bad sectors, and then use data recovery software on the clone.

Some freeware cloning tools are ...

dd_rescue: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Comparison between ddrescue and dd_rescue:
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

Ddrescue can perform multipass cloning. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass, and attempts the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. It can also clone your drive in reverse, thereby disabling lookahead caching. It keeps a log, allowing it to resume after an interruption.

The following thread discusses various freeware and commercial cloning tools:
http://forum.hddguru.com/the-best-disk-cloning-hardware-software-t10396.html

 

[thaghost101]

Best answer selected by thaghost101.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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