Legit Reviews

my friends hard drive failed. can you please reccomend some programs to recover the data from them?

http://www.file-recovery.net

I had good luck with that program

Mike

let me know how that one works for you! i may have to do the same on this little 20Gb Maxtor (yeah its old) soon, and i'd like to know how it works for you

I've used getdataback NTFS with success also...

http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm

The Freezer

My 200gb WD just failed about a month ago for reasons unknown. I tried the freezer method at first it didn't work..so I let it thaw out and put it back in, windows ran checkdisk on boot and started correcting errors until it stopped on another error. After the reboot I had to manually initiate the drive in admin tools only to find out that I could not access the data. Long story short, I got myself a external enclosure, put in the frozen drive and it turns out I had a corrupted MFT. I managed to recover about 100gb of data off the 200gb drive with Active UNDELETE recovery software. After that I formatted the drive but the strange thing is XP can't access the drive but with the external box it works fine. Right before it failed I had a S.M.A.R.T. spin-up time failure, yet the drive seems to work fine. I still need to know if I should use this drive or toss it.

Does anyone know how to check S.M.A.R.T. status on external drives?

with something like that happen i would toss the drive. that is just something waiting to happen. LOL

Yes but we all know how useless S.M.A.R.T. is for predicting drive failure. A lot of times S.M.A.R.T. will show a error yet the drive will continue to keep working. This is evident from the study google did back in Feb (http://searchengineland.com/070219-092214.php). I'm trying to get SpinRite to detect this drive but for some reason it doesn't detect the NTFS partition I formatted earlier with XP. SpinRite is probably the best program for maintaining hard drives.