Recovering data off an old HDD (If possible)

[Cream Soda]

I just had to replace my HDD because it would give me some "Disk read error" when trying to start. I got a cheap HDD USB enclosure, but no luck. Many things on this HDD that wasn't backed up. Anyone know of any ways, if its possible, to recover any of my old data?

[Cephius]

What happened when you plugged it in with the USB enclosure? Did windows detect it? If it does, you can try to run a chkdsk on it, then run some recovery tools and see if you can get anything off of it. If it didn't detect anything, the drive is probably shot and there's not much you can do. There are professional recovery services that can maybe pull some stuff off it, but for nearly $1500 a pop its really not worth it. There are also other adapters that plug directly into the pins and provide power, I find they're a little more reliable than external enclosures, but the chances of one working and the other not are pretty slim.

[Cream Soda]

It recognized it per se. It said mass storage device when i checked what was pluged into my USB, but i went to my comptuer and nothing showed up as an external drive or anything.

[Cephius]

It recognized it per se. It said mass storage device when i checked what was pluged into my USB, but i went to my comptuer and nothing showed up as an external drive or anything.

Plug it back in, right click my computer, click "manage" and then click "disk management". Scroll down a bit, and you'll see each disk and partition on your computer. Find the new one and see if you can assign it a drive letter. If you can, open it up and your data should be there. If not, run a check disk on that drive. Whatever you do, don't format it, as you'll be erasing all your data. If you still see nothing but can see the drive, try running this program to see if you can recover anything from it.

[Cream Soda]

It showed up, but wouldn't let me change the letter (was nameless). Trying the program now.

[Cream Soda]

Doesn't seem like I'm having any luck. Progam wouldn't work either.

[Niya]

just a thought, try it with a linux live system like Knoppix. burn the image, boot from it and then connect the damaged HDD. in case knoppix detects the disk and can still read it, a new symbol called [sdX1] should appear on the desktop (where X is a lowercase letter. just so you can keep all detected disks apart, linux calls IDE disks hdX and scsi/sata/usb disks sdX, where X starts as "a" for the primary master disk, "b" for pri slave etc. . partitions are numbered, so if your primary disk has 2 partitions, those would be hda1 and hda2)

when the disk is still readable, open it up with a (double)klick on the icon and check if the folder/file structure is still there. if it is, choose one of your (still intact) partitions, open it up so it gets mounted (the desktop icon gets a small green triangle on the lower right corner). then right-click the icon of the just mounted partition and choose to enable write access (yup, you have to manually enable writing permissions for each partition with knoppix, security feature so you don't accidently delete everything )
rest should be clear, copy everything thats still readable over.

if it isn't accessible this way, try to re-connect it internally and retry with knoppix.

in case even knoppix can't read it anymore... you won't get around using a commercial data recovery program. something like r-studio might do the trick, it isn't free but not too expensive either. as long as the disk isn't physically damaged (you'd probably hear that...) there's a good chance you can still get most of your data back. already tried r-studio at work and was able to recover most of the data from a hdd with a damaged MFT (master file table, something like a notebook that tells windows where every file is (physically) stored on the HDD)

[Cream Soda]

So after all this time, I find one program that works. Its called VirtualLab. Only problem is that the trial is only 1 MB worth of shit, which i got a screen shot or 2 just to test if it works. It worked just fine, but these fuckers charge 40 bucks/100MB and I can't seem to find any other program thats working atm.