Partitoning Failed, Drive Destroyed... Any good recovery software?

[Zeptinune]

Hey guys I was trying to partition my drive using 'Partition Magic 8' apparently 33% of the way in it came across bad sectors and aborted saying nothing had been changed.

Turns out I couldn't even boot my computer after... so much for 'nothing changed' right?

Anyway so I plugged it into this computer as a slave drive. It shows up in My Computer but as 0 bytes and when trying to open it, it says the drive is corrupted.

So is there any good file recovery software that anyone knows of? Anything that someone would recommend to me, paid or not paid.

Also as a side note, would it be better to format the partition and then try to find my files? As far as I know a format doesn't do much except for say the data is avaliable to be overwritten and I heard from a friend that if it's unaddressable it'd be better to format it and then try and look for stuff because while its corrupted part of it is unreadable by any program.

Thanks.

 

[Petey7]

Recuva does a good job from what I hear: Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

As for the part about partitioning the drive first. I would try using Recuva first. If it won't let you search for files on it, do a quick format. It does more or less what you described. A full format erases everything.

 

[housry23]

What brand is the drive. If you go to the manufacturers website sometimes they will have software that you can download for free that can check for bad sectors and fix if necessary and/or recover files from a bad drive. There are many free file recovery software out there. Just use Google to find them. Also, I have heard that if you put your drive in the freezer for a few hours you may be able to read it for a little while and get some important files off of it. Good luck.

 

[Petey7]

The freezer trick is for drives with dead electronics. The drive isn't dead yet, but bad sectors aren't a good sign. You might want to use the diagnostics software provided by the hard drive manufacturer to see if the drive has serious issues or not. If it does, then you may be able to get a replacement from the manufacturer. Hard drives usually have a 3-5 year warranty.

 

[Zeptinune]

The drive is a Seagate, it's only 80GB. So far 'Recover My Files' pro has turned up only 6GB (out of 70GB) of stuff and it's all pretty jumbled.. Recuva has only turned up 2 GB after a 'deep scan'. Most of the stuff are jumbled text files and little tiny .gif's that are useless to me... :/

EDIT: Gonna try Seagate File Recovery. See if that helps. So far haven't gotten anything really of use off the disk.. I need about 30-40Gb of pictures and videos, the rest is really unimportant.

 

[Barman58]

The first thing I would do here is

STOP DO NOTHING MORE!!

how much of the information on the drive is irreplaceable? if the drive contains images that are not reproducible or the only copy of your dissertation or first novel etc. you may want to consider professional recovery companies.

If this is not the case then several of the partitioning software suites provide partition recovery options

I personally do not use partition magic with windows 7 due to many problems that others have encountered since beta stage

Magic Server Partition Manager Software - Resize partition for Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2000. do a boot disk that did have this function (free) but not sure of status of current version

 

[Zeptinune]

Ok thanks for the advice. I wont partition the drive or format it or anything. I was going to try a number of programs to see if I can get what I need from it.

I only need 30-40GB of pictures and recordings that I lost.. the music and other documents are old and I don't need them. The rest was just the OS itself.