Data Recovery from Hard Disk

Hello All,

My neighbor has an old Dell Laptop with a SATA drive. The computer stopped working and Windows 7 would not load. I tried to fix the OS with the Windows 7 Install disk but I kept getting disk read errors. I took the drive out of the PC and installed it in a USB case. I started Windows on my Desktop and I can see the drive but it sets up as two hard drives. I cannot read any data on either drive but I have tried to run chkdsk which runs but it runs forever. The drive is 750Gb so it is a fairly large drive. I can right click on either of the drive icons and see properties but my desktop will not tell me how much space is used or how big the drive is. I just attached it a moment ago and now my desktop is asking if I want to format it. I also just tried to run chkdsk and now my desktop is saying it cannot access the drive. Sigh.

My neighbor has a tax file on the drive that he wanted me to try to recover. He does not care about the drive or the computer for that matter.

Does anyone have any ideas for how I might be able to read the data on the drive and take off his tax file? Is there a "go to" software or online service that I could use?

Thanks, Bill

You should have not interrupted the check disk. Once it begin, never interrupt.

I would say that your disk is dead and the chances to access the tax file are little.
There are companies that are specialized on retrieving data but the cost are very high.
Tell your neighbor that if he had data that he couldn't loose, he should have done a backup.

You can try to boot from a Linux flash. Lubuntu download

In the case of drive problems it is important to decide early on if it is worth the cost of professional recovery. It is possible to literally recover a drive to death. That is repeated recovery attempts can so damage the drive that even professional recovery is no longer possible, or at least not without great cost.

In this case I suspect you are already well on the way to an unrecoverable drive, if that point has not already been reached.

It is so very important to have backups of important files. Data recovery cannot be relied on. And never rely on the drive showing some symptoms or SMART warnings. SSDs usually fail without warning.

SIW2 said:

It depends how important the data is.

Active@ File Recovery is a tool for data recovery. LSoft Technologies

Thanks. Active@ File Recovery was able to rescues all but one file. It was only $29 too.

LMiller7 said:

In the case of drive problems it is important to decide early on if it is worth the cost of professional recovery. It is possible to literally recover a drive to death. That is repeated recovery attempts can so damage the drive that even professional recovery is no longer possible, or at least not without great cost.

In this case I suspect you are already well on the way to an unrecoverable drive, if that point has not already been reached.

It is so very important to have backups of important files. Data recovery cannot be relied on. And never rely on the drive showing some symptoms or SMART warnings. SSDs usually fail without warning.

Agree. I back up my entire OS and Data drive using Acronis.

Please mark this thread as solved.