Need to recover files from a corrupt? Hard Drive

hoofhearted4

New member
sorry, I didn't see a more appropriate place to post this. if there is, please move it there :)

i have a friend, who has an old PC. his died on him the other day. he said it would freeze at the windows logo screen and he got a BSOD. he has stuff on there he needs however. so i told him Id take a look for him.

I tried hooking up his PC to my monitor via VGA, and my monitor wouldnt read his computer? just went into power saver mode. so I hooked his HDD up to an external kit and tried to boot to UBCD4Win, but that game ME a BSOD? so i tried to see if i could just view it normally but when i plug the HDD, Windows wants me to format the HDD in order to view it. which of course, would be counter productive.

Disk Management says the file is Raw, which would imply there is no file system correct? which I know there is, which leads me to believe this disk is corrupted.

so how can I get files off his HDD? any other software I can try? i just had UBCD4Win from my days in school. Free options preferred. If the software needed costs money, I'll have to tell him to take it elsewhere

thank you!
 
Grab a copy of Hirens boot CD, you'll find disc recovery and various other drive related tools on there, boot from it and select where applicable. You can also use the "mini xp" system on Hirens to navigate around easily and drag and drop from drive to drive.
 
I have used this in the past ReClaiMe and it has pulled off some minor miracles where other progs have failed miserably.

It is definately worth its weight in gold, and has earned itself a permanent place on my USB stick of tools for PC repairs :D I can't recommend it enough to people, to me its definately top of its class in the file recovery arena.
 
for more serious recovery I use Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery-Professional. Of course you would need to buy it in order to use it. its very very slow, but gets the job done, I was recovering around 20gigs or so, that took a day and a half to recover and about 2hours to scan, but it was on a crappy old laptop so if you hook it up to a decent rig it should be easier with more ram and cpu.

recuva might be able to help you out with small files.

just a word of advice, don't expect to me recovering stuff like 10gigs of raw wedding footage or anything like that because there is almost no chance that will still be there intact.
 
Back
Top