Borked external hard drive.

InsomniaCalls · 3 Nov 2006 at 14:57

Colleague of mine recently had his machine rebuilt and backed up all of his data to an external hard drive (300Gb Seagate in case you want to know).
Disconnected the drive while the machine was re-imaged and when he plugged the drive back in it wasn't recognised by windows.
It was listed as a usb device in device manager but he thought he'd got around it by assigning it a different letter in disk management.
Now that it is recognised, Windows has picked it up as a 40Gb HD with a carbon copy of C's data on it.
It's the same on any pc.

Need to get his data back but ideally this needs to be done via a free utility.
Anyone know of any that would fit the bill?

Cheers

Si

wizardmaxx · 3 Nov 2006 at 14:59

What exactly is the prob if he can see the data ?

InsomniaCalls · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:04

He can't see the data that should be stored on there.
There was around 200Gb of data on the external HD backed up from C:\ prior to the re-image.
Now the external HD shows about 15Gb of data with 25Gb of free space.
The 15Gb of data that is showing is a carbon copy of C:\ after the re-image so is pretty useless.

wizardmaxx · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:06

Prob i see is that there are free data recovery progs out there, but they will recover the files, not the folder structure.

InsomniaCalls · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:10

Not fussed about the structure.
It's mainly his pst files that he's bothered about.

wizardmaxx · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:18

IIRC comes with 30 free trial

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

bledd · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:37

can you read it ok via ide cable?

InsomniaCalls · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:50

You mean crack it out of the casing and hook it up to IDE?
It's one of these:

edit: none of the recovery programs I've tried (recover my files and pc inspector) seem to find the files. They just pick up the 40Gb etc.

bledd · 3 Nov 2006 at 15:56

yeah, open it up, there's probably screw holes under the stickers

i've opened tons of usb drives and replaced the shells with icy boxes (but usually the drives show nothing if they're not working..), lacie drives and non branded ones, they all use ide or sata drives (i'd say 99% are going to be ide, unless stated otherwise!)