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Best Way To Recovered Data From This Hard Drive?

I have a Toshiba laptop. It would not boot--hangs at BIOS screen. I removed the hard drive and it worked (well it got to no boot device, did not hang in BIOS).

I put it in my Windows 7 desktop in an external enclosure and got this:

So I look in Windows Disk Management and I see this:

Is there any chance of recovering this data? Maybe run SpinRite on the hard drive? Any chance that Ubuntu or another Linux distro could see it? Or is it lost cause?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

rindi

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gta2011

ASKER

Thank you rindi. I will try it and get back to you!

Ashok Dewan

Try below command in command prompt :-

chkdsk /F <driver letter>

I hope it will work. If not , try to scan your hard drive for bad sectors with vendor's software. be sure to download the software from your HDD vender's site. It will try to repair bad sectors.

rindi

I wouldn't do the above until after having recovered the data.

Steve Smith

don't let windows near it - if it initialises or formats the disk your chances of recovering data are less

you can always run recuva (free) if the drive gets formatted to recover data - have you tried running a boot-cd or live cd of linux or faling that the ultimate boot cd to try and see if the drive if broken/ corrupt ?

Robert Retzer

There is obviously some reason that the boot sector got corrupted and the computer that drive came from could not see the operating system or when you put the hard drive in another computer it did not recognize the file format of the drive. Some times repairing the boot sector may bring back the drive to life. You will need a the windows cd or a self booting cd that has the software to repair the boot sector. Easus Data Recovery does a good job of recovering data even when a person has formatted the drive. I have used it on a formatted drive and it was able to recover lost data from the drive. Note: although the drive was formatted no data was written to the drive after it was formatted. Anyway Easus Data recovery has a free version of the software but it will only recover if I can remember right 1 gb of data, then if you want to recover more data you have to pay for the paid version. Well worth the price if the data is valuable to the person.

gta2011

ASKER

You win rindi! I actually had this software purchased and registered, I just forgot about it. It looks to be able to recover most of the data. Thanks!