help recovering crashed hard drive contents?

[Steve]

Hi!

I attended my first makers alliance meetup last tuesday and was pleased to find a group of kindred souls so close by!
I have been promoting the group at work and might have two or three new attendees to bring along next week.
I already have a question: a co-worker dropped his laptop, causing physical damage to the hard drive.
He purchased a new hard drive and restored the windows OS, and mounted the old drive in a usb/sata device.
He can see the files on the old drive but cannot extract the data, despite having downloaded a pay-for tool for this purpose.
Does anyone have experience recovering data from hard drives with so many bad sectors that normal file recovery processes do not work?
Including removing the platters from the bad drive and putting them into a different frame to eliminate issues caused by head damage?
He tells me in India guys do this all the time! ;-)
Any help will be appreciated!

Also, yes I would like to take part in the beer committee at the next meetup.
I clicked on the accept link in the email and was rewarded by an fail msg from the s/w that sent the msg.

Thanks!

Steve

st...@kramer.com


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[Spokehedz]

Try Recuva on the drive, and what it can recover. Physical damage is
the worst kind of damage to a hard drive.

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[Joe O'Donnell]

Hi Steve, thanks for spreading the word about the group. With our new CNC machine and growing creative, fun and skilled membership, we are getting closer to having the abilities of a flex factory or tech shop, if we don't already: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/06/05/silicon-valley-is-creating-real-jobs-by-making-real-things/ http://www.techshop.ws/ It's exciting that we have a surface mount device class planned, because that + CNC + mechanical knowledge + embedded programming + ai programming equals the ability to make virtually anything imaginable. If we set up basic classes for each one of those, we could all become cross discipline aware enough to take diy mechatronics to the next level. There are at least 2 very major projects that haven't been accomplished any where yet-an inexpensive metal/polymer powder sintering reprap, and an inexpensive PR2: http://humanityplus.org/projects/gadaprize/ http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview   Moving and examining platters is a skilled job that stands a good chance of further disk damage if not done by an experienced person with specialized tools. These services cost a few hundred and up in the US. If your friend really wants his data back and he believes there is physical damage, than he should use one of those services. If he wants to try additional software recovery, I would suggest practicing the tools of the systemrescue cd on another none important hard drive first, and than on his damaged hard drive: http://www.sysresccd.org/System-tools  Understanding the NTFS file system and tediously going through a disks information is often needed to get the most recovery. The general procedure would be to use systemrescue's tools to copy the entire disk block by block to a file or partition on a working drive, and than use sr's file system examination tools to try to piece together chunks of files using both automated tools and ones knowledge of NTFS. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134%28v=ws.10%29.aspx JoeO --- On Thu, 9/20/12, Steve <oldstev...@gmail.com> wrote:

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