How do I retrieve data from crashed harddrive?

[tepabajo]

I have a Maxtor 60g drive that appears to have failed, not physically though. I am using a W95 machine for testing (could be my first mistake) with EZ drive installed in the bios which should allow it to see drives larger than 2 gig. I first used a W98 FDISK bootdisk and FDISK/mbr command to fix the boot record that I believe was corrupted and then ran the EZ Drive boot disk utility to test the drive. It says all is okay! Now when I install the drive as a slave drive my bios sees only 8gigs instead of the full amount. I tried to manually input the drive data into the bios but the figures don't generate the correct size of the drive. Could this be because of the W95 system? Also, assuming that the data on the drive is still intact, what utility could I purchase to retrieve it without the convience of a boot record for reference? :bounce:

 

[Blakhart]

I would add a pci ide card and retrieve the data that way, unless I could slave the drive in another sys and burn a cd or dvd.

 

[tepabajo]

Update: I tried running the Spinrite utility and got the same problem with the others, that the utility only wants to scan and fix the active partition. I need a utility that either does not care about the partition and will scan the entire disk surface to retrieve data or one that can repartition the drive without losing the data thats there. Any suggestions, again? :dead:

 

[tepabajo]

Problem solved! Some guys recommended the EasyRecover DataRecover software from Ontrack and it worked perfectly! Did what no other software could do and it's worth every penny of it!

 

[MrGaribaldi]

Nice!

I've got a similar problem where a partition has gone missing with some very important data which I need to retrieve. So I guess I'll try that program. Thank you for your information.

 

[tepabajo]

Try the $200 option which is the EasyRecovery DataRecovery software. It should do the trick pretty well, I don't think it even broke a sweat. Down load the trial version just to let it check your system to see if it can find anything first. They know what they're doing there. Good luck!