How to recover data from HDD with no partition table

[itm]

I'm trying to recover data (mainly photos) from an HDD salvaged from a 14-year-old Windows laptop. When I analyse the disk using testdisk it shows "Partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55". No partitions are detected. fdisk indicates that there is no partition table.
The drive is an IBM Travelstar 25GB drive, model MH17951.

Can anyone recommend the best way to try to salvage data from this drive? I'm currently using the Hiren Boot CD (v12).

 

[hang-the-9]

Not a lot you can do if TeskDisk did not get you any info. Was this drive working before you removed it from the laptop? Or did it fail and you are trying to recover the data? You may need to bring it to a data recovery place or send it away to get the data.

Another option you can try it ddrescue which will attempt to copy the drive to a good one, with attempting to copy bad sectors several times. It can run for a long time though, days if there are lots of errors that it hits. I take it something like Recuva got nothing?

 

[itm]

Not a lot you can do if TeskDisk did not get you any info. Was this drive working before you removed it from the laptop? Or did it fail and you are trying to recover the data? You may need to bring it to a data recovery place or send it away to get the data.

Another option you can try it ddrescue which will attempt to copy the drive to a good one, with attempting to copy bad sectors several times. It can run for a long time though, days if there are lots of errors that it hits. I take it something like Recuva got nothing?

It belongs to a friend who asked me if I could recover the data. I believe that the laptop was no longer booting.

I haven't tried Recuva - presumably that will only work if it finds a partition to work on?
I'll look into ddrescue to see what it can do for me.

 

[itm]

Didn't have any luck with ddrescue.

The only remaining option I can think of is to allow Windows to "initialise" the disk so that it can access it, and then see if any of the low-level data recovery programs can piece together files remaining from previous partitioning/formatting. Can anyone tell me if this "initialise" option destroys whatever was on the disk before (i.e. would it make any chances of data recovery afterwards completely hopeless)?

 

[DR_Luke]

Do not initialize the drive. Writing to a failing drive only causes more damage. When you imaged the drive with ddrescue, were you able to image the entire drive without any read errors?

 

[JaredDM]

I'm with DR_Luke on this one. If ddrescue "didn't work" in the sense that it couldn't image the drive, then no data recovery software will even stand a chance. Ddrescue is as low-level reading as you can possibly get without going to dedicated hardware to extract the data.

If the data has serious value, it may be worth professional recovery. If the drive is spinning and sounds normal it's probably going to just be a Tier 1 case (we charge $450 here for that tier - some non USA labs are even cheaper)