carsick

Hello,

I have a 1.6(?)gb drive, Western digital Caviar 21200, manufactured Aug 1996. I had Windows 95 or 98 installed on it at the time it crashed. I recently learned that there is software that might be able to recover files from this drive so I pulled it out of storage to try my luck.

The only files I need from this are xls file for my Fantasy Football Stats from 1999, the year I was in charge of stats. We have yet to pay out the winners cuz the drive went inoperative literally at the last minute. (The scoring system was absolutely crazy so recreation is one huge undertaking). I'd like to get this taken care before one of us dies of old age.

When I plug it into my computer system (Vista) I can "see" it when I open windows explorer, but when I click on it I get "you need to format the disk in drive f: before you can use it"

When I run chkdsk on it I get "The type of the file system is Raw. Chkdsk is not available for Raw drives."

I've run about a dozen free recovery software programs on it with no success. A couple of them did try to scan the drive (heard it spin up and clicking) but eventually hung with out showing any file or folder listings.

Several years ago I heard that perhaps its the controller card, so I was able to pick up a batch of 5 of these drives off of ebay for cheap. After swapping all 5, still no luck.

Bringing it to a professional would consume the entire pot (approx $500) so kinda hoping for small miracle here.

All thoughts would be greatly appreciated. TIA.