Wondering if hard drive is recoverable

I am trying to see if the information is recoverable from a hard disk. The computer may have been powered down by someone during updating. When I restarted it later, it hung on booting, so I powered off and back on and then it wouldn't even start to boot and I was unable to access the drive at all. I tried unseating and reseating the drive but that didn't help at all.

I was able to do a live boot of Linux (both Puppy and Peppermint) and could find that there was a disk in the device manager but couldn't access it. I'm including a system report from one of the OS's and a screenshot of the disk manager from the other. (The former saved as a CVS text file so I figured it was best to leave it in that format). Let me know if you need any more info.

The computer is an Acer Aspire 5920 lapttop. The original OS was Vista.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

I've generally had better odds on recovery by removing the HDD and hooking it up externally (using a USB enclosure or USB converter cable) to a working machine.

Doing this, if the main partition is recognized, you can go down to the "Users" file and click on the user name(s) you want to recover. You must be logged into an Administrator level account to do this. Be sure you have enough free space on either the computer's HDD or external media (such as a USB stick) to transfer the files you want.

If you get a message that (drive letter) must be formatted before you use it, it gets a lot dicier. While a quick format will only mark the file space as "free", you still run the risk of corrupt or lost files. How bad depends on the condition of the drive and the restore software you're using. Do not do this unless you've exhausted all other possibilities.

For data recovery from a reformatted HDD, I've had the best luck with Get Data Back for NTFS. There's a trial shareware version but the full version will set you back $79. 7 Data Recovery Suite works well at $29.95; however it takes forever and leaves you sorting through a haystack of data trying to find the needles you're trying to save.

Finally, there are companies like Drive Savers who are uber experts at this. They're also uber expensive; their services normally run $800 and up.

 

Thanks for the advice. I finally got a USB - SATA adapter. none of the computers I hooked it up to seemed to recognize it. As a last gasp i went back to the one OS (Peppermint) that did recogtnize it and formatted it. I'm trying some utilites now like TestDisk to see if I can gt anything but I'm not hopeful

 

You likely just need to fix the MBR (master boot record)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392