question on behalf of a friend!

His laptop has died a rather horrible death,

"I briefly revived the hard drive to copy some files across using a 2.5" to 3.5" hard drive adaptor on my desk top pc. However it was not enough and has completely died now.

But the good news is I can buy a new hard drive for the laptop off ebay and then install windows on it from my desktop pc before plopping the new hd into the laptop.

So a new laptop cost has gone down from 500 quid to around 65 quid, which I am happy about but am sad at loosing so much data.

Does anyone know of a good data recovery program that could potentially recover my files before I set fire to the bastard?"

Anyone able to help?

Might try this:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139

Also a general Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=data+...&start=10&sa=N

Also you might want to mention that he cannot load XP on a new hard drive unless it is in the laptop. You just cannot move hard drives like that and expect them to boot. Generally they will not.

Hi,

If the harddrive has stopped working in the desktop pc as well, theres a good chance you wont get anything back off the hard drive. You need to find out whether its a physical drive fault (in which case throw it on the bonfire, its not worth messing with) or whether the drive is feeling lazy or has a damaged format.

I dont know how fluent you are with PC's, but when you switch the desktop PC on (with the laptop drive installed) does it show the laptop drive in the BIOS as an IDE device? The BIOS is that black screen with the white writing that shows in the first 10 seconds or so of booting up. It will show a quick list of IDE devices attached to the motherboard. Such as CD / DVD drives and your desktop's own hard drive. If it does list the laptop's hard drive, there may be hope yet.

Ive had plenty of hard drives that may seem "DEAD" but have really just thrown a wobbler and lost their format. (i.e. Instead of thinking they are a hard drive and running the FAT32 or NTFS file system like they should, they decide to be a donkey and drink budweiser because they have had enough of being messed around)

If the harddrive shows in the BIOS, i highly recommend a program called Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional. This has proved to be VERY effective (but also very pricey) at reading ********/toss/crap/knackered/muff-munching hard drives.

If the hard drive doesn't show in the BIOS then it may well be a physical fault and you can kiss it bye bye on its way out of the car window as you go down the M6 at speeds in excess of 80mph.


Dont throw it just yet though, let me know how it goes first.

Best of luck,
Steve.