Dead drive recovery?

[BobsYourUncle]

I have an old Fujitsu MPE3170AT IDE 17 Gig that I am trying to recover 3 years of pictures from for a niece.

Has any of you had success in this process?

To be more specific, when I hook the drive up as a secondary master, it shows as scrambled hieroglyphics on the POST screen, followed by Secondary Master Failure. It won't show in Windows. It also won't show in a coouple recovery software programs I have tried.

In the BIOS it shows as a 2 Meg drive with the sectors etc. at low incorrect numbers.

The drive runs - it spins up and I can feel it humming, so I know its running. There are no bad noises or clicking of the heads banging something so its operation is smooth.

Something is very scrambled / corrupt and I would really like to help her by getting the pics back.

Has anybody performed such a task or KNOW how to go about doing it?

Sending it out to an expensive data recovery place is out of the question.

Thanks.

 

[brian]

well the most popular program is spinrite.

 

[BobsYourUncle]

well the most popular program is spinrite.

Though I have been building, fixing and upgrading computers for a lot of years, I have never actually tried anything to pull data from a dead drive, so I'm unfamiliar with spinrite and any others.

I have 8 computers running in my house and many thousands of gigs of storage. The greatest software recovery program I have ever used is called BACKUP! I keep copies of everything on multiple drives in the event of a failure. I also run RAID on most of them.

But my niece . . . well, she is like most who never backup until they lose a drive.

I'll check it out. Thanks.

 

[BobsYourUncle]

Well, I tried SpinRite on it - no cigar on that one. Though the drive shows in the BIOS as a 2 meg, SpinRite does not see it.
Dang! I was hoping.

Now I have to find some other ideas. . . . . . . . .

I'm certainly open to suggestions.