Data Recovery from Old HDD - Help

First, to everyone, I apologize if this has already been posted. I just spent the past few hours sorting through posts and searching, looking for someone who may have had a similar issue and found a solution.

I have an old internal HDD 80g Seagate. (Windows XP) It failed suddenly three years ago and I replaced it with a new drive. However, I kept the drive in hopes of a future recovery effort.

Now is that time

I just connected the old drive to a USB ATA/ATAPI bridge and connected it to my Win7 x64 machine. The drive reads on my computer and also in the device manager. It is assigned as E:.

However, several things are happening. 1st, windows hangs. The bar scrolls along the top on explorer, but never provides the details on E: I cannot right click, nor left click, on E without explorer becoming unresponsive.

Next, I noticed that most of my programs also start to hang. I can't even provide you with screenshots of what's happening as I can't get online, I can't open programs and I can't run anything.

I used Mini Tool Power Data Recovery. I ran the program, then plugged in the drive after it spun up and then the program was able to read the drive. But, explorer is still unable to read it without getting hung up. The recovery software did an ok job pulling some data, but... it was so slow. I let it run for three days and only 12% was read. The program looked to still be going, but I wasn't sure if this was normal, or if I just needed to be more patient (ok, 72 hours is a long time-At this rate, two weeks? Really?)

I have two assumptions: 1, that because it is XP x86 Win7 x64 is having a hard time with it and why explorer can't view the disk.

2, that it's the USB connection and therefore too slow or the data corruption was too great.

Will freezing the HDD work?
What other solutions to I have to get this thing back for a few seconds to extract the "Mydocuments" folder.

 

Thank you. I will perform this tonight and try to post results.

 

Went through the steps as described and used the free software. Same issue. Computer is bogged down even in safe mode. It seems like the computer is having a hard time reading the corrupted drive.

Just a quick question as well. When the drive is connected, do you think it's the security applications that caused the other applications not to run and why I can't right click on anything?

 

Hi

I've recovered data from several drives, and yes... sometimes it can take a week or more of just letting the computer dedicate itself (with recovery software) of trying to read the data off of a disk. Often, the platters or heads are degraded or worn, making reading the data a painstakingly SLOW process. It all comes down to whether the data on the drive is worth the time investment. If it is, then buck up and let 'er run until it's done.

I will say also, that iCare Data Recovery (paid software) is worth the money. I haven't used Mini Tools, but I've used several other free data recovery programs, and none have had the success rate of iCare in my experience. It still takes a long time, but seems to do a better job at recovering data.

Also, as a last note, in case I wasn't clear... the specs of your computer won't determine the speed of the recovery process. It all comes down to the drive cooperating with reading the data... that's what takes so long. As to why it hangs up Windows and apps, I can't really say... seems any troublesome hard drive does that to the whole system, for some reason.

 

I'd try dd-rescue (link), Or this tool OSF Clone after you have an image you can open and extract files with OSF Mount.