Dead Drive

[Chenzhen]

Just before Christmas I managed to crash my external drive, messing up the file structure or whatever, and I can't access it anymore, it doesn't even show up in the explorer window. I'm guessing this has happened due to years of abuse with pulling the USB cable without clicking that damn "Safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray...

What I'm looking for is people who have experience with recovering files from broken drives and can recommend software for this task. I tried one program which managed to rebuild a lot of the files, making me able to preview them etc... but it took like 3 days to get to 80% and then the program locked up and refused to continue (this happened twice for a grand total of 6 days work wasted...) That program was made by a company called Stellar Phoenix, so leave that one out when making recommendations

[Shuemue]

Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows

[Kriz]

I recommend, strongly, as in do-this-first, running SpinRite on the drive.

If there are any bad sectors, then SR will iron that shit out.

Any recovery software is going to be so hit or miss it's hardly worth the trouble. I hope SR can fix the drive, I know it almost always solves issues that sound like yours (I do this a lot, hah).

Also, so long as you use any OS later than XP, pulling out early just leaves you with a nasty note from Windows, provided you aren't actually writing to the drive.

Let me know if you need more direction.

[Shuemue]

You've obviously never used R-Studio. If there are no physical errors, and often if there are, it'll recover everything.

[Kriz]

It's not about recovery, it's about repairing. If the drive has issues that just need to be fixed, that should be the first step, then try to recover.

It's easy to do both, hell they both are like 5MB downloads.

[Shuemue]

I'd rather recover priceless information than repair a drive worth $100~

Priorities I guess.

[Kriz]

Right, because repairing potential bad sectors in the drive means that the data must be destroyed in the process? It certainly wouldn't help the recovery process afterward?

Seriously, why be so antagonistic?

[Shuemue]

Oh, perhaps your implication that my solution was 'not worth the trouble'?