Hey all, gratuitously provocative's external drive went dead this morning. i've plugged it in to my tower and windows has told us the drive needs checking and there are errors. i haven't let it do too much (inherent distrust of windows and file systems) but it's obvious something is borken.

if anyone has experience with data recovery programs, plz post! this is all her personal files, photos music and most importantly uni stuff.

Can you still see the contents of the HDD?
Lotsa things you can do if you can still see the data
Buy a new HDD, ghost the dodgy drive over onto the new drive, just make sure you have it set to ignore CRC errors & read bad sectors. May take a long time though you can usually get the data off that way.

Another tactic is to run a HDD Regenerator over the disk an try an repair it that way, you will still need to look at getting a replacement HDD anyways.

Failing that and worst comes to worst, you could try Ontrack Data Recovery who are at West End, not cheap ($600 + ) but they are specialists in Data Recovery

If the drive is giving I/O errors, i.e. beginning to fail, first thing to do is to get an image of the drive that you can work off before it is too late and nothing is recoverable (guess how I know). Once you have an image you can start trying to work through the filesystem errors.

A lot of imaging tools will freak out if I/O errors occur, or will be counterproductive and damage the drive further. Best tool for the job, from the research I did a little while back when a drive failed at work, is ddrescue (for *nix)

running xp sp2, it's ntfs drive and no, can't open it at all. i can see the drive in explorer, but trying to open it gives the "in page error".

u will need a program called r-studio

it should sort you out

Get Data Back for NTFS is the best win of all
get a boot cd with it on (MegaISO) or bartpe or something
boot to cd
slave up the hdd and another spare hdd
watch your stuff come back to life
worked for me 10+ times (customers et al)

another vote for r-studio

thanks guys, trying Get Data Back now, will update when it's done.

sounds good mate
short of a drive that won't spin up or stay spinning, i've never failed with Get Data Back

stellar phoenix, not free but awesome. I'd take the thing out and plug it into an IDE or SATA port if possible though, wouldn't leave it in a usb caddy.

yeah, didn't mention, but it was the first thing i did.

stellar phoenix is free, or at least theres a free version

+1 for SP, it does rock quite hard and has always saved my ass

been recovering data via Get Data Back for a couple of hours now. thanks for all the input. mucho appreciado.

stellar phoenix is free, or at least theres a free version

last time i checked the free version only finds stuff, you can't recover anything with it.

oh right, my free version came from a few sources, almost like a torrential source