Data Recovery Software

Hey

Recently my laptop got infected by a bug from using Google Chrome (I read about it on other forums - seems like I'm not the only one who was affected). Because I had to force shut down my computer a number of times, my hard disk got damaged.

There were two partitions on my hard disk that I wanted to retrieve data from. I was able extract data from one of them but I haven't been able to from the other one. I am using the damaged hard disk as an external drive and although I can read the files, I have not been able to copy them onto my new hard disk. The damaged hard disk is making the dreaded "click" sound so I don't know how much more time I have before I can get back what I need.

Is there any good free data recovery software you would recommend that would help me recover the data? I recently spent a lot on getting my computer fixed so I can't afford to spend a lot of money on commercial software. I have seen people recommend Recuva but I don't want to experiment much given the state of my hard disk.

English is not my first language and I've tried to explain things as best I can but if anyone needs more information, I'd be glad to help. Thanks!

 

You could try booting to a Linux live CD as it just might be able to recover files that Windows cannot. Download Puppy Linux and burn it to CD as an ISO. Then boot to it and explore the drives it is seeing - they are along the bottom of the desktop and have names like sda1 etc rather than drive letters. You can just drag and drop files to the target disk.

Your English btw is a darned site better than that of many of the natives

 

Thanks for your help! I'm not very tech-savvy at all and so I was wondering if it would be risky for me to boot to Linux when I'm using Windows 7 on my laptop. I've never done anything of the sort before but I'd be willing to try if it's not very risky and relatively easy to do.

I was finally able to copy some of the files from my damaged hard disk that I'm using as an external disk now but some of them could not be copied (maybe because they're damaged already?). Would booting to Linux give me a chance to recover some of those damaged files or does this mean they're probably damaged for good?

 

You aren't likely to damage your Windows when booted to Linux unless you start deleting files in the Windows partition. Make sure you have both the source and target drives open on your desktop and then you can simply drag and drop from source to target.

All you can do is try it and see if it works. It doesn't sound too good but it is worth a try. A clicking drive is a dying drive so use it as little as possible until booted to Puppy.