You'll need to REMOVE that hard drive from your laptop and purchase a
"drive-caddy" as here and install it there. Here's where to buy:
Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter CB-ISATAU2 - Newegg.com
for under $20 US.
Plug the
"drive-caddy" with your old hard drive into another working Windows computer via the
"drive-caddy" included usb cable. In 1-3 min. that computer will recognize your old laptop drive and any information on it. You should look in the
MY COMPUTER to find it. It will usually be E: drive or F: drive. or any letter drive after C: (boot drive), and D: (dvd drive).
From there, once Windows recognizes the drive you can use common Windows recovery programs such as
SPINRITE or
RECUVA to recover your data, as Bassfisher said. We also recommend
TestDisk (Linux) and
GetDataBack (Windows) as other alternatives.
Make sure the hard drive of the computer you have your "drive-caddy" connected to has sufficient free space to copy all your information to. You may need to borrow or buy another external usb hard drive of the same or larger capacity as your original laptop drive to have sufficient room to copy all your files over to, if the hard drive of the computer you are working on does not have enough free space on it.:wink:
If this sounds like too much work, or too much money to spend, consider taking it to your local licensed Computer Pro (don't take back to the same shop where they did your Toshiba repair; those guys sound flaky to me if they lost your data! They didn't burn you
DATA BACKUP DISCS??? What, are you kidding me? :facepalm
.
Ask them how much they charge for Data Recovery; this will be
$35-$120 in the US; 2-3 times that outside of US. Many Techs as myself got certified in Data Recovery and specialize in it.
If the 2nd repair shop or Independent Tech tells you the drive is dead and no data can be retrieved from it, you are left with very very expensive
PROFESSIONAL DATA RECOVERY which is where your drive gets sent out to a special company that disassembles your drive in a Class 100,000 Clean Room (that's what they make spacecraft in like JPL/NASA), and do forensic recovery of your data from the drive. This is usually beyond the means of the home user, and used extensively by business and governement. I have used this for several customers over the years and recovery success is 70-99%. :grin:
You'll have to think carefully about
WHAT you have on that drive. If you have
NON-REPRODUCEABLE documents such as Tax Records, Real Estate Deeds,
Irreplaceable family photo archives and the like; it may be worth it to you. Costs start at $250 and go up from there. Timewise it can take from 3-10 weeks or longer to get your stuff back.
How much is that missing information worth to you in Dollars and Cents to get back???
Let us know how it goes.
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