Recovering data from a severely crashed drive - what utilities?

[queuebert]

I was wondering what tools exist that allow one to boot from floppy or (preferably) CD and examine files on an existing hard drive and, ideally, copying them off to a network drive. The laptop has never been backed up, and has a drive with about 2GB of back sectors out of 15GB total. I was asked to see what I could do about getting at the data.

I was under the impression from an offhand comment that Symantec Ghost could do this, but that seems not to be the case.

 

[mainegeek]

Hello Queuebert,
I use GetDataBack.

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

It is not free but it paid for itself the first time I used it. The software needs to be installed on a functioning PC with the problem drive slaved to it. The Laptop drive would require a special adapter to interface with the pc.
You would also need to know what type of file system you are trying to recover from. They offer this bundled with FAT and NTFS.

 

[m130]

Try the "Get Data Back" software. It is handy and I use it at work to recover.

 

[Kofy]

GetDataBack I too have used it.. restored 30gigs of info.. recomended it to a friend who used it to restore 80gigs from an NTFS partion. there are 2 Versions... One is for Fat and one is for NTFS. Make sure you get the version that you need. but they are both worth having..I keep both in my tool kit.

 

[queuebert]

Okay, I will give it a whirl. Thanks everyone! Will probably post an update.