Advice on recovering data from a corrupted & dying drive (two drives)

[photofiend]

Hi everyone, I hope you might be able to help.

Last night I heard an ominous knocking sound coming from inside the computer - it was an HDD and as it was malfunctioning it crashed the PC.

I isolated the drive not going past POST to work out which was knocking and once the power was cut to the drive I rebooted...only to find that one of my other hard drives is no longer working.

It says that Windows can't access the drive - it shows the drive in Explorer but it doesn't know the size, Disk Manager can see it and says it has a healthy partition but that's about it.

When I reboot with the drive in, before it loads Windows (Windows 7 64bit) it says it needs to run a chkdsk scan on the drive...apart from it doesn't it boots directly into Windows.

So I'm a bit stuck on both counts...the mechanical failure drive I am going to plug in via USB in an external caddy and try and copy the data from it before I RMA but the other one...

My main question is how can I recover the data from the drive when Windows won't recognise it?


Thanks

 

[photofiend]

Oh dear, no-one has any ideas?

I'm a bit bothered about just trying to muddle my way via articles as it's not happened to me before, I'd prefer any suggestions from people who have fixed their drives.

 

[Snipergod87]

I know this isnt the answer you were hoping for but if windows doesnt even see it there isnt really anything you can do. I was about to get a drive working for about 30 minutes after freezing it for 24h and got data off it it but your failure sounds different, but on another drive which was making the clicking noises it didnt work. If the data is really that important bring it to some data recovery professionals.

 

[photofiend]

Thanks for your reply.

Thinking about it I'm not sure whether Windows could still see the drive that was failing or not (before it locked the machine and crashed), I was so focused on finding out which drive it was and disabling it that I didn't pay a lot of attention.

It's getting late now but I'll be investigating it more tomorrow, I'll try plugging it in using an Icybox USB enclosure and see what happens...fingers crossed!