Crashed Hdd Data Recovery

[Coodie]

Has anyone here had any experience with Hard Drive Data Recovery.

I recently had my hard drive crash, and it is not completely destroyed, merely has bad sectors, however it is quite unreadable normally. I have contemplated taking it to one of the numerous data recovery services, but am obviosuly hesitant, as it is also chock full of ab ad dl media and stuff.

I downloaded a fairly decent program, ran it but the eta to completion was over 300 hours, however after stopping after about 10 hours, I did manage to recover some stuff from the hdd, so it is definitely viable, I'm just not really that keen on investing almost 350 hours into it.

Has anyone ever had any similar experiences.

If so - can you recommend a good (discreet) UK data recovery specialist

- or even better, a decent HDD recovery software tool. I've googled, but its difficult to separate the crap and malware from the good,.

Help would be much appreciated

Coodie

[tenderheart]

Download a live cd like this one: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current-live/i386/iso-cd/debian-live-504-i386-gnome-desktop.iso

Burn it

Set your pc to boot from CD

Boot into the live CD

then open a terminal Applications >> accessories >> terminal

then type:

mkdir ~/Recover

su -

fdisk -l (this will give you a list of drives hooked to your system)

You now want to replace the /dev/hda1 with the drive letter that appears for the drive in question. If it's the only drive it should be hda. Second drive is hdb and so on.

e2fsck -Avp /dev/hda (we want to fix it too right )

mount /dev/hda1 ~/Recover

and bingo!!! you're newly fixed drive is now accessible in your home folder in Recover

[belinda_sue_fox]

Use the free avaliable tools.

Data recovery services ain't cheap. Useless your a business and NEED the data your going to have a sucking lemon face at the costs.