Take it to data recovery consultant?

jsagaga02

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Jul 4, 2010
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Hey guys,

So a couple of days my laptop hard drive failed because a textbook fell from my table and onto the laptop which was on the floor (As I got up to go to the kitchen I was holding my textbook and did not securely place it on the table which made it fall easily :( ). First thing I did was unplug the laptop and removed the hard drive after opening up the laptop. I took the hard drive and connected it to a sata cable and a power connector from my psu and hoped that it could be read on my PC. Weird thing is, when I did this, the hard drive was recognized in the BIOs, but not in windows. I restarted my PC, but now it wasn't recognized in the BIOs anymore. Although what did happen was that during the "starting windows" boot, the CHKDSK automatically came up with a countdown. I did unfortunately let it run without knowing that it can really take a long time to complete. I restarted my PC when the CHKDSK stopped progressing @ correcting error......in file 3759. I left it like that for 2 hours before restarting my PC during the CHKDSK. So I hooked it up to an enclosure, it did however show up in windows' disk management, but I couldn't assign it a drive letter and it was showing "offline" and "not initialized" which states that it needs to be formatted so I wasn't going to do that just yet. I then tried using Ubuntu Live CD and no luck. I'm down to my last option (I think), which is to take it to a data recovery professional to see if they can recover anything from it. I have a lot of important files in the hard drive, especially a semester's worth of assignments and other documents as well.

So what do you guys think? Keep in mind that I am a college student, so my pockets aren't deep when it comes to $ and I understand that these data recovery services are very expensive.

Info on hard drive:

Western Digital 250gb WD2500BEKT.

Thanks Guys! :)
 

jsagaga02

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Jul 4, 2010
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I tried several recovery softwares like recuva and testdisk. But the main problem is that the hard drive isn't being recognized in the BIOs and windows. Even when using an enclosure, windows still doesn't recognize the drive. Do you know if the softwares you mentioned are able to somehow force windows to detect/recognize the drive?