I have a damaged Hard Drive. Well, it’s not mine it’s a client’s and he wanted me to see if I could retrieve the data from it before he spent the big money to send it out to a data recovery place.
The disk is physically damaged as the tower was dropped. It makes a clicking sound when you boot up and it freezes at the Vista splash screen.
I have done some data recovery on fried disks but never one that had any physical damage. I have a SATA to USB adapter so I hooked that up to the damaged drive. I have two machines, XP and Windows 7. When I connect the USB cable it does its thing and says that the drive is ready to use.
However, it doesn’t show up in My Computer. It does show up under Disk Management but and says it is a healthy FAT system but no drive letter or volume is assigned.
Should I try to initialize the disk or run chkdsk to see if that fixes the problem or should I just let it alone and send it out to a recovery place?
I was also wondering if I might attach it internally to a system that has an existing SATA drive and try and use it as a slave.
I know I’m probably wishing for the impossible. But I figured since I have been able to recover data from fried HDs in the past when I was told it couldn’t be done without sending it out the pros, I might exhaust all options.
Thanks,
Bernie
