Recovering a hard drive

[rbcp]

Last year, a hard drive that I was using for storage crashed.  I tried the freezer thing but that didn't work.  And I tried a few miscellaneous things via windows but no luck there either.  So the hard drive has been just sitting around for a year.

I recently discovered how awesome Hiren's boot CD is and today I've been trying out some of the utilities on it to recover my drive.  I'm not having a whole lot of luck with it so far, but EasyRecovery Professional is at least recognizing the name of my drive and it's slowly reading files from it.  It claims that it's found 2007 directories and 44097 files and it's listing the files as it finds them.

It's been stuck at 20% for about an hour now and it says it has 5 hours to go until it's done.  I'm hoping it's just at a bad spot on the disk and once it passes that, it'll speed up a little.

Anyone have any advice or recommendations for tools to use if this one doesn't work out?  I forget which others  I've tried.  So far, EasyRecovery Professional is looking the most promising, though.

If this works, I'll have about 50 gigs of old video projects recovered, some that I hadn't backed up!  I hope something works...

[splynt0r]

I've had hard drives dying a lot lately aswell, It's really quite annoying if you dont back your stuff up on a Private FTP 

[gangals]

Do you know specifically why you HDD died?

Partition tables out the door or are you getting the Click of Death?

If you are getting bad sectors, I would recommend SpinRight 6(and choose option 2) which is on HBCD.

BTY, what version of HBCD are you using? The newest one is 8.9, but if you look at the change logs, a lot of the useful programs aren't updated that often, so older versions still work fine.

I'm assuming your BIOS can see the drive, can you see it in My Computer or Disk Management?

[rbcp]

Do you know specifically why you HDD died?

Partition tables out the door or are you getting the Click of Death?

If you are getting bad sectors, I would recommend SpinRight 6(and choose option 2) which is on HBCD.

BTY, what version of HBCD are you using? The newest one is 8.9, but if you look at the change logs, a lot of the useful programs aren't updated that often, so older versions still work fine.

I'm assuming your BIOS can see the drive, can you see it in My Computer or Disk Management?

This drive used to be my Windows XP drive and it just stopped booting one day.  It was still readable so I used it as a secondary drive to store things on.  Guess that was a bad idea.  It finally died a year later.  There's some pretty horrible clicking sounds coming from it sometimes.  But today it's been relatively quiet.

I'm not sure which version of the boot CD I have, but I remember seeing SpinRight on there.  I'll try that out later this evening.  This is still stuck at 20% on the same file name so I'm probably going to have to abort it.

[gangals]

If you can't get your data off, you can send it my way and I can take a look.

[rbcp]

If you can't get your data off, you can send it my way and I can take a look.

No way, then you'll find my home made porn!  Thanks for the offer, though.

[splynt0r]

This drive used to be my Windows XP drive and it just stopped booting one day.  It was still readable so I used it as a secondary drive to store things on.  Guess that was a bad idea.  It finally died a year later.  There's some pretty horrible clicking sounds coming from it sometimes.  But today it's been relatively quiet.

I'm not sure which version of the boot CD I have, but I remember seeing SpinRight on there.  I'll try that out later this evening.  This is still stuck at 20% on the same file name so I'm probably going to have to abort it.

That's exactly what happened to mine , it just ate my bootsector , but since I backed it up I thought "Fuck it I'm changing to Linux now."

I know a few people who this has happened to.
Might be a faulty XP update or something