I live on the eastern coast and we had a series of recent electrical storms. During this time, my hard drive stopped working in my laptop. I have been unable to boot Win7 from the drive. Subsequently, I tried to run a start up repair (one of the options on boot) and it was unsuccessful. I dismantled an external hard drive and plugged my laptop's hard drive in since they are both SATA drives. My other pc seems to recognise the hard drive (it makes an icon ni My Computer for it), but I do not know if it's recognising the hard drive or just the adapter itself. When I try to open the drive from there, it tells me it cannot access the drive due to an I/O error.
I would appreciate if anyone has an advice on good open source and free software that I could use to recover the data from the drive. I have already tried Piriform Recuva and it was unsuccessful in recognising the drive in the first place.
Any advice would be good. I am a college student and cannot afford professional data recovery services so any solution needs to be DIY. I really need to recover these files as they are both school and work related quite crucially so any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
I am not sure if this helps but the failed hard drive is a Western Digital 320 GB 5400 RPM with 8 MB cache speed. I don't know if this information is useful. i am a few days out of a two year warranty but i need to recover my data before i can return the hard drive to the company if that's even ultimately an option (I have heard that WD will not honor problems that are related to logical failures which this seems to be, since the drive can power up and by all indications audibly it is working fine (you can hear it spinning and clicking inside and sounds like a normal operating drive)).
I would appreciate if anyone has an advice on good open source and free software that I could use to recover the data from the drive. I have already tried Piriform Recuva and it was unsuccessful in recognising the drive in the first place.
Any advice would be good. I am a college student and cannot afford professional data recovery services so any solution needs to be DIY. I really need to recover these files as they are both school and work related quite crucially so any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
I am not sure if this helps but the failed hard drive is a Western Digital 320 GB 5400 RPM with 8 MB cache speed. I don't know if this information is useful. i am a few days out of a two year warranty but i need to recover my data before i can return the hard drive to the company if that's even ultimately an option (I have heard that WD will not honor problems that are related to logical failures which this seems to be, since the drive can power up and by all indications audibly it is working fine (you can hear it spinning and clicking inside and sounds like a normal operating drive)).