Recovering from old hard drive

[tobyw]

Hello, I just took the old harddrive out of my Dad's computer. It was giving a disc read error and could not boot windows. I connected it up to another computer, it picked up the drive and seemingly the partitons, but wasn't able to open them, it said the file was corruptd on one and that the rest weren't formatted.

What should I do?

[Huderon]

I've used ADRC Data Recovery Express to get files of an NTFS drive which was corrupted and couldn't be accessed by anything else I tried. You can download it here and try it. The trial will let you recover small (up to 100Kb) files, but if a scan shows files at least 50% recoverable it's worth paying for (and at around 7$US I reckon it was well worth the fee).

[tobyw]

Will it let me get the file names too though? Can it recover filesystems? I can recover the raw data alright...

[Huderon]

Yes it will give you file names, though as the disc I tried it on had a corrupted master file table, it wasn't able to give me the full path for a lot of files, It did allow me to recover everything I wanted from that drive, including a few files I'd deleted quite a while ago. Since it was one of the few programs I tried which could even access the drive and data (and was by far and away the cheapest), I paid up and got everything I wanted back.

Download and try it. If it doesn't work for you all you'll lose is a bit of time as you won't have to pay to try it. I found that for most files a 50% or better chance of recovery let me get the file back. PDF files and some video files with less than a 100% score didn't work, but they weren't important to me anyway.