HDD recovery

[Cream Soda]

Now, I've been using various programs and have been having trouble recovering data from my old HDD, it registers and reads it but doesn't like to all come up. After going through a bunch of programs with luck, do I have any more options? Are there any programs that clearly stand out for this type of job?

Also, should I try reformatting? or will that ruin any chance at all to get any data back?

[Effluo]

Now, I've been using various programs and have been having trouble recovering data from my old HDD, it registers and reads it but doesn't like to all come up. After going through a bunch of programs with luck, do I have any more options? Are there any programs that clearly stand out for this type of job?

Also, should I try reformatting? or will that ruin any chance at all to get any data back?

Do not reformat. That makes it much more difficult to get any of the old data back. Also, no fdisk, and no chkdsk, or you'll also lower your chances of recovering all the data. It sounds like you have some UNC errors on the HDD. I would recommend a program like SpinRite or MHDD to test the drive for any error and slow sectors. Running these programs will not hurt any of your data. Are there any 'clicks' while the drive is spinning? You said it comes up, so that's a good sign.

If you're having trouble with finding software that is able to get your data back, you most likely won't have much luck unless you take it somewhere that specializes in data recovery, as they will have programs and hardware that you won't regularly find on the internet, nor want to buy for one time use.

Data recovery can be expensive. You'll want to check around and get prices, and then decide if getting your data back is worth the cost. I would say get a cheap external drive to backup your stuff in the future. I lost my HDD not too long ago, and have been backing it up ever since, lol.

[fishstix]

I accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive once while reinstalling windows and I lost my very first collection of mp3s, stuff from as far back as 1998 :/

[Mayareira]

Yeah, unless the data is important for you there isn't much point in going for a professional data recovery. External drives are pretty cheap nowadays, just get a big one and back up your hd next time.

[rezn0r]

Data recovery can be expensive. You'll want to check around and get prices, and then decide if getting your data back is worth the cost. I would say get a cheap external drive to backup your stuff in the future. I lost my HDD not too long ago, and have been backing it up ever since, lol.

Cost us $1690 last week to get an image of an old SCSI UW that died in an engineer's system (because he didn't feel like saving a few months of work to the network shares...) and I was surprised at how cheap that was. Ontrack Data Recovery was the company, they are extremely fast and professional, but yeah for personal files the price might not be worth the service. Other companies quoted much higher too.