Pretty sure my hard drive was crashed by a virus, not a hard ware failure, but I'm currently lacking funds to pay for recovery. It's disconnected from my computer and stored in a box. Can it wait a few days, weeks, months for recovery?

It can probably wait a few years . . .

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

You can wait 11 days (10 days+24 hours) if you disconnected your HDD in SATA mode.
You can wait 102 days (102 days+4 hours) if you disconnected your HDD in IDE mode.
If you will wait longer, you will be able only to recover MBR partition and MFT table.

yes, as long as it is stored correctly and safely.

Can you define what you mean by crash?

Is the drive mechanically sound? I'm not aware of too many viruses damaging the hardware to begin with.

If it's just a virus infection, why not clone the disk and work off the copy? Grab your data and call it a day..

I've kept hard disks for many years in a paper box without any problem.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

I don't know how to clone it, but if you could tell me that would be great.

What happened exactly was that I woke up one morning and Windows was notifying me that there was a serious problem with my drive and did I want to back it up. I said yes, and suddenly my computer shut down. A friend replaced the hard drive for me, but could not get the crashed drive to boot. He thought that if it was a virus, it might be Windows specific and tried to boot the drive with linux just long enough to grab the my documents folder. Linux saw the drive and in big red letters, said, "Drive failure imminent". We decided to hold off on actually booting the drive with linux, while I researched more professional services.

The drive should be mechanically sound. I never heard anything odd coming from it.

It should be very inexpensive recovery at the present moment.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

There are a number of free disk clone utilities out there. Just google'em up and see.
Once you have a copy. Work from the copy without fear of messing anything up. If you can't make headway yourself then you can try a pro-service.

There are also free utilities to help with performing a logical recovery, which is what I believe this to be at this point.

Does this disk have in intact file system, mft, that sort of thing..?

I don't have time to explain what cloning and imaging does. Nor what programs you can use to pull data off, if you even need them to begin with.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Windows won't see the hard drive at all, so I can't tell whether it's intact. My friend is a hardware guy, so we held off on booting with linux, so I couldn't say what's intact that way either. We just didn't want to cause a failure on the drive before we considered other options.

I don't know how I would clone a drive if I can't even see it with Windows.

Was your HDD primary- windows was installed on your damaged HDD or it was additional?

It was the primary. Windows 7 was installed on it.

recommend downloading MHDD, getting that working: then do switchmbr command on it to remove the boot sig, so windows won't "tamper" with the drive when it boots up, this will also prevent the disk from mounting (it will claim it needs to be formatted in windows)

Then use DR software to extract you files and then scan them with virus scan at the same time your extracting/ASAP.