Data Recovery on Old Hard Drive

Matthew86 · 09 Nov 2013

Hello,

I have been having great difficulty trying to figure out how to recover all of my data on my hard drive that just stopped working three nights ago. I was foolish to not back anything up. I have attached a picture of what my desktop looks like with two windows open. One being Disk Management and the other being Minitool Partition Wizard. They both show the hard drive that I am trying to recover. That hard drive will not show up on "My Computer" but I can see it in those two windows. What can I do to recover this data? I have tried a couple tools, but they could not see it, and the Minitool Partition Wizard was still at 0% after 18 hours of scanning. Thank you.

jumanji · 09 Nov 2013

Hi Mat the w,

Welcome to Seven Forums.

I presume it is an internal drive on your desktop.

Please run the manufacturer's diagnostic/repair utility. ( Since you did not tell us the make/model number of the drive, I can only give this general statement.) Check whether it is able to repair your disk.

essenbe · 10 Nov 2013

After following jumanji's suggestion, if you are talking about what disk management lists as Disk 0, it shows unallocated, which is not a good sign. Try right clicking the drive from the bottom portion of the disk management window, select change drive letter ot path, next screen select add and add a drive letter to it and it will show up in explorer. If diring this process disk management wants to create a partition and format the drive, don't do it. It will make your data extremely hard to recover, if not impossible. Two other possible solutions to recover the data.
Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console
Emergency Kit - save your files from a dead OS - you can use any version of Linux you like the same way, Mate is just a little easier to use than other distros.

Mark Phelps · 13 Dec 2013

Best data recovery tool I've used is RecoverMyFiles. Downloading and installing it (for evaluation) is free -- which will let you see what it finds. But, you have to purchase a license to do the actual file recovery.