Things are certainly easier if the drive has no hardware issues though if it's onboard cache is fried, that is an easy way to say buh bye without sending it to a pro data recovery company and getting charged way too much for a personal drive.
I think the program I use is Easy Recovery Pro, but it's at least a $500 program but it doesn't get any more thorough. I've had on average about 75% successful restores compared to 25% unrecoverable.
Though this is not a consumer program really. I just happened to have it. I used to to test drives after wipe them via Peter Guttman shredding before I ship a drive to someone such as a used drive sold on eBay. I run Gutman 3 times on small capacity drives giving me well over 100 wipes. Now that will destroy just about any type of recovery efforts.
The number #1 rule of a drive that you want to recover.
UN PLUG IT. Do not write to it. Do not boot from it. It is now a slave. The more you write the more your chances decreases of salvaging things. and never install the recovery program on the bad drive. I might also recommend removing the drive from the external case and placing it inside the case via IDE or SATA whichever applies. This might be a long procedure and the USB throughput will be a bottleneck.
Good Luck.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sihlouette
One morning i turned on my computer and as it was booting a diagnostic came up checking all of my files on my external hard drive (Western Digital 250gig).
I left it to check the files, but after an hour or so it was still going, so i manually turned my computer off. i turned my computer on again and the same thing came up...but before it started i ordered for it to be canceled. My computer booted fine yet when i went to open folders in my external HD it said some files might be corrupted and i couldnt access the files in the folders.
I screwed around with the HD and some programs for a bit and eventually it ended up to where all the files in my external HD became 32bk...everything...250gigs worth of movies, music and programs became 32kbs each.
However when i looked at the properties of my external HD it said that the HD was nearly full with only 2 gigs spare.
I have brought my external HD into a shop and have runned recovery programs myself yet nothing has worked.
What can i do to recover all my files?
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