Article on Hard Drive recovery

Plantwiz

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1139&page=1

JDMurray

I've never used the TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.html) utility mentioned in this article. Have any experience with it?

Plantwiz

No.

I stumbled on this when I was looking up some utilities (test some, download old lost ones, etc..) and thought I might look into this.

As a whole the article seemed ok and we have had a few newer members ask about HDD issues, thought this might save someone some typing.

Downside with that utilitiy is I more commonly see DEAD...stone dead damaged head drives because the client let them seize up before calling and not so much with data errors, but I have a drive (I think still works) that may have a damaged partion table I'll see if I can get it to work with this utility (depending on time) tomorrow.

JDMurray

You might try using SpinRite first (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm). It's a non-destructive hard disk maintenance and repair utility that I've used successfully for years. The only downside I've found is that it won't work on an EIDE master drive whose SMART system is blown. You'll need to make the drive a slave to an EIDE master drive with a good controller to use SpinRite on it.

bighornsheep

Anyone heard of Stellar?

I've used this before:
http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm

I was able to recover all files from a hard disk that was corrupt, some exe files didnt work after they were recovered, but all the documents and folders were restored perfectly.

keatron

I still swear by Spinrite. (for certain situations).

Plantwiz

jdmurray wrote:

You might try using SpinRite first (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm). It's a non-destructive hard disk maintenance and repair utility that I've used successfully for years. The only downside I've found is that it won't work on an EIDE master drive whose SMART system is blown. You'll need to make the drive a slave to an EIDE master drive with a good controller to use SpinRite on it.

Yes, I've used Spinrite and it is very good.

I didn't have any time today to test the program out Maybe next week?? I'm still curious about it.