Data recovery for a VERY mentally ill hard drive

[dgooge]

I have an 80GB WD hard drive... funny thing is now going into Disk Manager it shows the drive as "unreadable".. and it also shows the drive as having 1.32 TERABYTES free!

The drive took a bit of a shock but nothing other drives wouldnt be able to handle. What would be a good tool to try to begin data recovery? For some reason Windows thinks it has trillions of sectors, and normal tools that just try to recover deleted partitions are being fooled into scanning every single one of the phantom sectors.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to this thing... but if anybody wants a cheap terabyte hard drive just pick up a WD800 and throw it on the ground

 

[kjv1611]

If you have another hard drive you can copy the data to, you might want to consider one of these programs:

http://www.active-undelete.com/

I used their Partition Recovery program, and it worked VERY well for my situation.

It can actually restore the data directly back to the hard drive, or else create an image of the drive.

I had tried other programs that couldn't even see my data, and ended up with this one. In your case, there may be others that will work fine, but I'd try this one, as it actually goes to the level of looking at the hardware, and not just what Windows stores about the data/hardware.

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"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me