Is there hope for my crashed hard drive?

[windsonged]

I woke up the other morning to a notice on my computer that a problem with the hard drive had been detected and would I like to back up my files. I clicked yes and a minute later the computer shut down and restarted to an older hard drive that had been the primary before I rebuilt my computer. I immediately turned it off and called a friend with amateur computer building experience. He has installed a new hard drive and my computer is now working. (Yay!)

However, he could not get the new computer to recognize the crashed hard drive. We had hoped that we could see it long enough to snag some documents off it. (He also had to repair the old hard drive on the computer.) He decided to try booting the drive from a linux system in the hopes that he could see the drive long enough to snag the "My Documents" folder. Linux saw the drive, along with the older drive and the newly installed drive. The older drive and newly installed drive read as healthy. The crashed drive says in red letters: "Disk Failure Imminent."

We decided to hold off on trying to snag my files while I do some further research with people with more expertise in disk recovery.

I have two questions: First, what are the possibilities and likelihood that there is hope of recovering things off that drive? The most critical stuff is in the "My Documents" folder and amounts to at most 3 gigs, likely less. What's my best bet, trying to get in there and snag the folder, or trying for a mirror of the drive? What's a good place to go for this? My friend warns me off of chain stores like Best Buy, but how do I find a good local drive recovery place?

Second, a great deal of the stuff on the crashed drive was actually on the old hard drive before I moved it onto the primary drive. The old drive was never rewritten or reformatted and not a lot was put onto it after I moved things off. Would a program for recovering deleted files be able to find files that were moved off a hard drive? Is moving the same as a deletion as far as the hard drive is concerned?

[laptokowiec]

USe DMDE and scan ntfs "old drive".

[Vulcan]

@windsonged,

There were too many points that would need clarification in your first post, for me to have time for all the necessary typing. Therefore I'll just reply to a couple of your questions.

how do I find a good local drive recovery place?

As a starting point, I would ask for recommendations on this forum. There are several respected members who work for DR companies in various parts of the USA. You didn't list a state for your location, so that makes it difficult for readers to know if they are local to you, or not. It is common for DR companies to receive drives via national (and sometimes international) shipping, so personally I would prefer to use a good DR company, even if that means shipping to a different state, than to use a local DR company who is less good.

Is moving the same as a deletion as far as the hard drive is concerned?

From a Windows perspective, a "move" is a "copy" followed by a "delete" on the source filesystem.