Trying to recover files from a failed hard drive

[Karsten75]

My wife brought home a failed hard drive from her office. It used to be the boot drive (Win 7) on her office PC. It failed and the techs there just put in another drive and reloaded Win 7.

She has some files that were not backed up by their corporate backup process and is hoping to recover some of those, specifically a .PST file (Outlook email file) that she used as a mail archive.

I put the drive in an external USB enclosure and connected it to my computer. I heard the USB "bong" and then saw Windows trying to find drivers for it.

The drive is an 80GB WB Caviar SE with a date code of July, 2005.

It won't show up in Disk Management or in My Computer. It Device Manager it shows up with a yellow Exclamation mark under USB devices. If I leave it powered on, then at some point in time it starts making a soft ratcheting noise.

Piriform Recuva of course can't operate on the drive since Windows can't see it.

Do I have any other alternative to try and recover the data or is my best bet to send it to a data recovery company? If so, any recommendations for one in the USA?

 

[USAFRet]

If Disk Management, and any of the current user space recovery tools can't see it, then you are probably out of luck apart from a data recovery company.

 

[Karsten75]

yea, that's my fear. There are so many things wrong in this scenario, I'm just biting my tongue to avoid marital discord....

 

[fzabkar]

WD's drives often suffer from damaged firmware modules which themselves are the result of degraded heads.

You can use SeDiv to read the firmware modules. Depending on what we find, there may be a DIY solution.

http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Easy3.9Password01234567890.rar
http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Settings.rar

SeDiv WD Read ROM & Modules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UgFfhkkAwY

For more information, visit the HDD Oracle:

http://www.alexsoft.org