Seagate 7200.12 NTFS Save Files/Save Hard Disk

[connollypg]

I have a number of files I would like to try and save off of the disk, and/or I would like to know if there is any saving the hard drive for future use. I record music and use adobe programs for freelance artwork. Also there are a number of pictures I'd love to recover (though as far as I know they're backed up on google drive). The .wavs of some recordings were recent and were not backed up in time before the disk crashed.

I apologize, this is lenghty but i'll throw it all out there.

As best as I can remember this is the sequence of events:
My daughter was born three weeks ago, my wife decided to pop in a usb thumbdrive to save baby pictures to my pc (Dell Optiplex755 refurbished, Win7 32 bit, Intel dual core processors, Seagate 7200.12 Barracuda 1TB hardrive).

A few pictures, unknown to me at the time, were corrupted wither on the flashdrive or the camera's memory card.

After she moved the pictures to the computer it froze, and she restarted.

Windows Desktop Manager crashed, and CPU in task manager was at 100% always.

I ran an error check, and four files were found to be corrupt and fixed (3 photos, 1 reaper file, and 1 system 32 file. (I'm an idiot and I didn't write down the system 32 file.)

After error check, I noticed a yellow exclamation next to optiplex in devices, and I was notified that the driver for my intel processors was not compatible suddenly with windows. I tried to download new optiplex drivers but chrome and internet explorer would freeze as soon as I tried to leave my homepage, (google and msn.com)

I tried to find a system restore point but was told none existed on anything.

System froze while trying to find the drivers again from dell, and I had to shut down.

upon restart windows update decided to kick on and tried to install updates, and all hell broke loose.
Windows won't start at all now, not even in safe mode. Ran startup repair 4 times and was told it could not repair.

At this point I got a SATA hard disk reader from a friend, and was able to attach to my laptop and recover 80% of my files. The other files/folders were a cyclic redundancy error. (one of the folders was the folder with the baby pictures in it, the others were a completely different photo folder and my reaper files on two albums)

I ran a chkdsk on the drive and got unreadable on files 600-703, 1217-1500 and every file after 3000.
windows setup a chkdsk on startup, and now the disc says NTFS, and will not open. chkdsk tells me the drive is RAW now.

I tried Recuva to no avail.

Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'd like to save as many files as possible obviously though I'm nervous that bird flew the coup long ago.

 

[Mellon Head]

It almost sounds like you got some malware from that USB stick.

If you have a friend with a Linux computer, or have access to one, you can often hook up a non booting drive and recover files that way. I don't know the exact procedure but something like this may help, too:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/287439-emergency-kit-save-your-files-dead-os.html?filter