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Seagate, Maxtor tools, PartitionMagic, Testdisk...nothing works

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deolmstead

Technical User
Nov 19, 2003
3
US
I'm not sure what happened, but the three hard drives that were in my HTPC are dead. I had to replace the Power Supply, so maybe there was a power surge? Anyway...

I have one of the drives, the one with our photos on it, hooked up as a secondary IDE drive on my desktop now. I don't need to save the drive, just get the files off it. But I cannot figure out how to do that.

BIOS recognizes the drive...usually. Sometimes it doesn't see it, or it misreports it as 8GB (it's a 200GB drive). Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital all report the drive as unrecoverable. I've been trying all day to use Testdisk to recover the partition info, but on three successive 'Analyse' scans it gets to 70%, starts making loud noises, and just hangs, reporting a Read error on every single cylinder.

Is there anything that can be done? If I tell Testdisk to simply add a partition, will that make the files unrecoverable? I'm going to leave this scan going overnight, but I'm doubtful it will ever progress past 70%.
 
Don't add anything to the drive. The less you do to a damaged drive the better the recovery chances are. I think you should try a data recovery tool. A lot of users have reported good success with GetDataBack Note that there are separate versions for FAT32 and NTFS
 
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