Hard drive recovery advice

[musicrab]

Dear experts, some advice please. I'm trying to recover somebody's data from a dropped laptop drive.
Win8.1 can see the drive but chkdsk (or whatever it is with Win8.1) freezes at 69% (for recovery I've connected the drive to a desktop SATA port directly).
There's no clicking or odd sounds - but its definitely got a major problem.

To date I've used win8.1 to "sort" corrupt drives out and this is the first time its failed to recover.

I'm trying ontrack datarecovery demo s/w and, even though it takes a long time to access the drive its given me a file/directory listing - sounds promising - but whether it can access the files is another question!

Here's a screenshot of a folder I did properties of. Can anybody advise whether this should give me enough confidence to buy the product? Cheers! (pic below but also attached if the resolution of the image is poor)

My thinking:- although the software can see folders and files this doesn't necessarily mean it can access them. Either that or the company in question wants more money by me sending the disk to them.

Attachments

[Keatah]

Dropped disk means internal mechanical fault. I'm sure more experienced experts will pipe up and agree with me.

[jono-ats]

Read Kroll's warning. Very. Carefully. It's there for a reason, and it applies in your case.

You can't use a software tool to compensate for a hardware problem.

If you care about "somebody's" data and their chances for reuniting with their data, I strongly suggest you stop now. The nature of the hardware failure must be ascertained, and addressed, before a recovery attempt can continue.

Jon

[pcimage]

Read Kroll's warning. Very. Carefully. It's there for a reason, and it applies in your case.

You can't use a software tool to compensate for a hardware problem.

If you care about "somebody's" data and their chances for reuniting with their data, I strongly suggest you stop now. The nature of the hardware failure must be ascertained, and addressed, before a recovery attempt can continue.

Jon

Agree, please read the warning on the screen. If you continue ignoring this warning, you WILL kill the drive, possibly beyond recovery

We can almost certainly retrieve the data for you at a reasonable cost, AT THIS STAGE.

[hhddrec]

Hi musicrab,

Tha best is to stop data recovery with ontrack datarecovery solution or other software solutions, because your heads are badly, and problably media will be down.

in this step a PRO with correct tools probably can help you.
the best in this case is to Contact with local pro if your data is valuable.

[musicrab]

Thanks guys. Customer has been advised to try, in first instance, Kroll (this is the only "professional" service which I am familiar with.)

[hhddrec]

Hi musicrab,

goog decision, report us your advances.

[jono-ats]

I recommend pcimage. They'll do as good of a job for less.

[laptokowiec]

Use ddrescue to clone the hdd to the other disk.
Then you can recover data

[jono-ats]

Use ddrescue to clone the hdd to the other disk.
Then you can recover data

You can do that on your own drive, but not on someone else's.

[fzabkar]

Use ddrescue to clone the hdd to the other disk.
Then you can recover data

You can do that on your own drive, but not on someone else's. :-)

ISTM that Kroll Ontrack's software product would be less likely to recover the client's data than ddrescue, or is there something about the former that we should know?

[jono-ats]

fzabkar: It makes no difference what software too you pick: You can't use a software tool to compensate for a hardware problem.

[northwind]

You can't use a software tool to compensate for a hardware problem.

Let's make that a sticky.