Seagate USB HDD - Died a death, drive recovery time....

[PPRuNeUser0211]

G'day one and all.... the on-going saga of Frau Target's USB issues goes on. We have a seagate freeagent go USB hdd, the kind that powers itself from USB. Generally quite a handy piece of kit, but yesterday, copied a whole set of TV episodes to it, and all appeared normal.

Unplugged from lappie A without issue in the usual fashion (actually used the safely remove hardware tool for once, even though caching is on so dont need to) then plugged it into Lappie B. Detected the hard disk normally, but imagine my surprise when the folder I had just copied on to it wasnt there.

Naturally I thought I had been a muppet and copied to the wrong folder, so went back to lappie A with the drive, plugged it in and got a "H:\ is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" error. Have had this problem once in the past with a specific directory on the harddisk, ran the windows standard error-check/snag fixer scandisk and that fixed it no snags. Unfortunately, because it's now recognising the drive as a raw drive with no data on it at all as far as it can see, it wont run scandisk...

Anyone know of any decent drive recovery software? Preferably freeware! Or indeed another solution to the snag?

[None of the above]

I've managed to recover a certain amount of data on two hard drives that were about to breathe their last in the past few days.

Try:

1. Start > Run > type in cmd then click OK to get a command prompt.

2. Type in chkdsk e: /r (replace e: with the drive letter of your external hard drive).

It will churn through five steps and might take a while to complete, but I've had good results with the procedure.

N o t a

[Ant]

Steve Gibson's "SpinRite" is I believe highly regarded. I'ts not free (US$89) but I was sufficiently impressed by the reports that I got me a copy. Details here (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm).
While you're there, take some time to peruse the rest of his site (projects and free stuff links at the bottom of the page). Theres a LOT of interesting stuff there.

[Parapunter]

I read a good yarn on the Register, where a dying drive was removed from a machine, plonked in the freezer for a few hours & then hurriedly wired back up. The low temp was just enough for the bearings to work one more time while they whipped the data off the doomed disk. One to file away for the future:)

[Saab Dastard]

"Yarn" is the word, there is no real evidence to suggest any truth in this - and it is certainly not in the armoury of professional data-recovery companies.

SD

[Dick Fisher]

This is not just a yarn. Believe me, it works.

I suffered a boot failure recently on a Seagate drive and after checking the usual stuff, I removed the drive to the freezer for an hour, then refitted it and got a perfect result. I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but the drive is still working happily, four weeks later!

[NormanPiece]

I would advice you try Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery (http://www.stellarinfo.com) Software. It has helped me in recovering my lost data. Stellar Phoenix is a file and partition recovery utility which recovers data from inaccessible hard drive or help us in recovering lost data due to accidental format, viruses, software malfunction or sabotage.
To try the utility download the demo from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm