Hello, I am running windows 7 professional (64-bit) and recently killed a hard drive disk somehow (windows would no longer load off of it). It is a 500gb Toshiba hdd identical to the one now running in my laptop. I would like desperately to recover some files from this burnt out HDD.

After taking it to a computer specialist who initially told me the drive was in decent shape and should be recoverable for about $200, I was then told there is serious physical damage and the drive cannot be recovered for less than $650 - a good chunk of change.

From there I purchased a voyager s3 HDD to usb dock and decided to see what I could do myself.

Windows Disk Management shows that there is an unallocated, un-initialized disk, but any attempt to initialize results in a "cyclical redundancy error".

Hard Disk Sentinal sees the disk and says it has 81% health. It can tell me the type of disk as well as the size. This program also gets a cyclical redundancy error on every single sector it attempts to analyze the disk.

Testdisk is unable to write to the disk when I tried to replace the MBT in addition to being unable to analyze the disk.

What suggestions do you have that might lead to recovery of data aside from finding another computer tech who might open the HDD for a lower price (I'm hoping to avoid this)? I greatly appreciate your help.

Kindly describe how you killed a hard drive disk it will help us generate the solution.