Data Recovery Vital

I am interning at a sign company and yesterday I knocked a wire which pulled down the external drive the owener keeps all her work on. It fell hard enough to knock the faceplate off.

Plugging the drive back in via usb: the computer recognizes it, the folders show, but sometime the files do and sometimes they don't. When the files do show I cannot copy them over to a new. It says it can't read the source disk. We have gotten small files to copy over. We have successfully opened a file and used it. But we have also seen a folder full then empty (during two different attempts.)

My fear is that I read if the file in on instance is seen as corrupt it's marked for rewrite and that may be why it is now showing empty? Another forum said the computer writes to a disk each time it's read and it may have overwritten it?:cry

The drive is not making any sounds - clicking, jamming, etc. It is spinning. It does stay on most of the time but will punk out on occassion.

I am hoping I can recover the data at least some of it because it is being recognized and read. Can anyone point me in the direction of software to copy it. I noticed on your site Unstoppable Copier 5.2 (http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/unstoppable_copier.html) It has a 5 'star' rating by over 3 hundred votes. Is this a good place to start?

Any help is more than appreciated. It was an accident and the owner/friend is more than understandable but some of the work, logos, jobs, and fonts go back to 2007.

Last note. Please no back up advise. She knows. And don't even get me started on the work environment with cables here and there. We need to rework that too. She knows. The company is not big enough to spend 500$ to a recovery company. If anyone knows one in Florida for a resonable amount with a good reputation she is willing to spend 200$.

Thanks for all. :-o

 

Turn off that drive; it will catastrophically fail, maybe within hours!
Get an identical or slightly larger replacement hard disk drive.
Take the dropped drive out of its enclosure.
Connect both drives to another working PC with the failing drive and the replacement connected as drives 2 and 3.
Get a copy of RoadKill's RawCopy ( http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P22/Raw Copy )
Use RawCopy's physical drive option to copy the failing drive to the replacement and then swap out the bad drive.