Data Recovery After Hard Drive Failure

This is my first post, so be gentle...

I searched the forums, but unable to find what I was looking for I thought it necessary to seek the knowledge of wiser people than me.

Dealing with:

Dell Dimension 4600
P4 2.66
Phoenix Bios
2G of RAM
3Ware Raid in Mirror setting
(2) 250GB WD Caviar
No clue as to the maker of the mobo
XP Pro

After 2 years, the Maxtor 120GB drive in my machine bit the dust. Typical blue screen on boot not able to restart in any mode. Ran Disk check from bios and got code 7

Installed a mirrored array with the 3ware card, 2 - 250GB WD Caviar drives and while I was in , dropped another GB of RAM. Reinstalled all the software and voila! back up and running.

Question: I have pictures of my daughter and about 40GB of .avi video that I was editing when "it" happened. I'm not prepared to spend $2000 - $3000 for professional data recovery, but wanted to know what I can try to attempt to recover data off the disk.

I reconnected the dead drive to the SATA drive spot on the mobo and the 3Ware card runs the two WDs and system boots from the mirrored array. I can't see anything on the Maxtor when I look in Explorer. It recognizes the drive, but says that the disk is not formatted and won't show any data.

Any ideas on how I can get my pics, analogue video and email off the drive?

"newbie, with just enough knowledge to be dangerous....."

 

You could try something like http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
in hopes that the drive is not totally gone... the drive is recognized ..maybe the boot sector got hosed and data recovery is possible. Have you ran any of the manufactures diagnostics?

 

No, I have not tried the mfg diagnostics. I've never had to deal with that before (thankfully. Lessons learned can be painful). Can you provide some insight as to how that works?

Thanks for the help.

 

I am new to this also and am dealing with a similar problem. I think you have a Westerdigital drive. My local tech guy suggested going to WWW.westerndigital.com ...... then to the downloads area ....... and then DL "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" and then run the "simple" and "extended" test. Should give you an idea of what is wrong with the drive.

Good luck.

 

Well, went to Maxtor site and downloaded utility which confirmed what I already knew. "drive is failing" DUH. Now to try to get the data off the drive. Giving recovermyfiles.com a try. Will post back

 

Question. The data you are trying to recover is on the 120 gig drive?

If so, GetDataBack, has been a life saver at work. It can recover Formatted/Fdisk'd partitions like no other. Oh, and I have tried quite a few.

But, in the end, it is a paid product.

I sound like some spamming troll. Sorry!

What works for me, may work for you.

http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm

 

I just want to second thefool as I've had much success with GetDataBack and if you can't recover your data with that, it's probably a physical defect with the drive and you will have to seek professional help.