Nearly dead hard drive, need a little help.

[Streeteh]

My sisters laptop hard drive has sadly bitten the dust. I have a replacement on the way but i'm currently going through the chore of trying to retrieve whatever i can from the old drive. Windows won't let me even access the drive, it shows in my computer but the capacity isn't visible and explorer hangs when i double click/right click on the drive.

I tried a trial of some software called recover my files which did actually manage to get into the hard drive and even allowed me to view some of her photos and music files so the hard drive definitely isn't completely dead. Unfortunately recover my files seems to be designed for recovering deleted files; it won't let me just copy existing files away to another drive. Ideally i need some software that will access the drive much in the same way as recover my files but will just let me copy the files to another drive. A small price would be ok but ideally some free software would be perfect (recover my files costs a whopping $70 so it's kinda out of the question on that front too)

Cheers in advance for any advice.

[Mark]

If you are in any way familiar with Linux, then the first thing to do is to clone the entire drive (or at least as much as you can), with a tool like dd_rescue. You can then attempt recovery from the clone.

The reason for doing this is simple - firstly you want to access the failing drive as little as possible, and secondly you have a backup in case a recovery attempt makes things worse. Direct attempts at recovery from the failing drive might just kill it for good.

From there, there are various tools you can use to attempt to get the files back. Daz is more of an expert in that area than I am.

[Daz]

Can only echo Mark really. Do nothing to the drive that doesn't involve making a full clone of it, then ideally make a copy of the clone, then you can get to work.

Trinity Rescue Kit (http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12) is a good distro that comes loaded with pretty much all the tools you'll need, and some decent documentation (http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=37&front_id=12). It also has some useful startup options, like mounting all the disks it can find and sharing them over the network automatically.

If you're happy to try some Linux tools then it certainly wont cost you anything.

[Streeteh]

Cheers guys, looks like i'm reinstalling ubuntu

[Admiral Huddy]

I have a copy of PE builder handy with Recuva which you can boot from CD. Very handy when recovering data.

[Daz]

Cheers guys, looks like i'm reinstalling ubuntu
Dont need to install it, could do it all off a live CD :) Not that I wouldn't encourage it's use you understand ;)

[Streeteh]

Just had a quick go with Trinity Rescue Kit, impressive piece of kit but it effectively gave up on the drive. I'm considering doing the same tbh, i've been telling her to buy an external HDD and backup her stuff for over a year now but she's ignored me. Fortunately i backed up all her photos and documents about 2 months ago.

Gonna call it a day and look into getting linux up and running again tomorrow for one last big push. Thanks for the advice guys, i may well end up back in here clueless once again.