dropped hard drive

J

Jimmybeam

New Member
Ok, so last night my external 2.5in hard drive hit the deck. Im gutted because there are photos on there that I dont have backed up. Something inside is broken. The drive spins, but the heads are slightly touching, slight rubbing noise. So, the photos that I want were on my laptop, but I formatted last week and did a fresh install. I have not installed much since the reinstall, so Im thinking I can backup to a new drive the files that are still on the laptop and do a recovery of the laptop. How does recovery software work?? Can I use it with the current install or will it wipe it and try to recover what was once on there??

Cheers
D
 
Recovery software is hard, and depends if you did a quick format or a standard format, a quick format just marks everything as erasable (and only erases when u write over it) where as a standard form writes 0's over the whole drive which will erase everything.

Good software is hard to find, I haven't found anything amazing yet, definitely nothing good enough to help you.

Best advice I can say is don't touch or use the laptop, pull out the hard drive, plug it into another computer, use the other computer to do the recovering. The more you use the laptop the more temp files etc are made, writing over what could possibly be your old photos if you have any luck.

Other thing you could try is replacing the hardware on the dropped hard drive, I have heard of people doing this with luck as the platters arn't damaged, but you need to use the exact same model hard drive.

Hope this help and good luck, losing photos suck that's why i do 2 backups of my photos, external HDD and DVD's (and being on my computer)
 
Thanks Curtains. I was in the process of backing things up. I didnt lose everything, just the files I backed up to my external drive before the format. Other files were on another computer, on my laptop, and on the external drive. Used the HP recovery utility to format and install windows off the partition. Im not sure what kind of format that is. Id say it was a quick format, because it didnt take very long. Appreciate your help.

D
 
It's probably just a quick format. Depending on where the photos were located, they are probably still accessible given the right software. I think the software I used once before was by ****** and had decent amounts of luck restoring lost files. The makers of CCleaner have also come out with their own sofware;

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

I've yet to try it, but I love CCLeaner and Defraggler so it might be worth checking out... I have been meaning to see how it works personally but have yet to need such software :P
 
Thanks for that. I have a friend who is in IT and he said he will likely be able to get some stuff back. I dont see him all that often so I dont want to pester him, so I'll ask this here. Will the recovery process effect the current install and the current file structure?? I have yet to back up the files I want to keep, but if its not necessary at this time, I can wait another week or so to buy my new external drive if the recovery is done in the next few days.

Cheers
 
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