Retrieving Data from corrupt hard drives

I have an old PC with two internal hard drives. Haven't used the PC in a bout a year, and when I tried to boot up, couldn't do it. I booted from the Windows install CD, and tried to correct the problem, but both hard drives seemed bad.

I bought a new hard drive, installed Windows on it, and am now using that to run the PC. My goal is to simply get as much of the data off of the original two hard drives. But when I connect them (one at a time) as a secondary har drive, one shows up as unformatted, and the other will appear, but eventually disappear when I try to access data from it.

My question: what software can I use to either A) try to fix the drives so that I can access the data, or B) simpoly pull of as much data from the damaged drives as possible?

Thanks.

 

1) You should connect the old drives to the secondary IDE channel to avoid jumper or other technical issues.
2) If you REALLY care about the data, get another, like sized drive and use something like Roadkill's RawCopy ( http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=22 ) to clone the failing drive first. After that, use a recovery program to get the files from the copy.
GetDataBack ( http://www.majorgeeks.com/GetDataBack_for_NTFS_d2773.html ) is one of the best and will let you see the recovery before you have to buy it. If that works and you don't want to spend the money, try one of the freeware programs.

 

Thanks for the help. I'll use RawCopy to try to copy the hard drives to an external drive, then try to recover the data from that. I'll download GetDataBack and see how it works...any recommendations on freeware that could do the trick?

 

An external drive will be much slower and you need to be warned that you are doing a sector copy which will overwrite whatever is on the target drive.
FreeUndelete gets good reviews.

 

there's a bunch of freeware
Recuva - http://majorgeeks.com/Recuva_d5514.html

Others - http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?id=38