I am desperately trying to help a friend recover some data (photos mostly) from their hard drive - it's an ide Western Digital 500Gb drive. They reported that the drive was working one day, then 'not' the next - "it might have been a virus..." 
I started with the obvious stuff - downloaded the WD diagnostic software (dos) and ran a quick check which showed no problems (I will be running a long test over night tonight to make sure)
The drive shows up as unpartitioned (and remains so!)- but I had to initialize it (hope this didn't cause any damage!). I have tried all of the programmes suggested here (Spinrite, GetDataBack, Stellar Phoenix Recovery Plus, to name a few.) The purely 'recovery' programmes report 'no files found'. The disk readers (DiscExplorer for FAT32/NTFS and others) show something strange. The opening sectors of the drive contain only the message stating that no OS is loaded on the disc, followed by a significant amount of nothing (no boot sector/mbr/file system etc) Then about 50Gb in (guessing) it changes from '00' to 'FF' (in the hex view) or 'EOF' (end of file) in the text/FAT 16 view. It appears that 90% of the HDD has been overwritten with 'FF' unless I'm misreading something here?
I've pretty much given up any hope of retrieving the data, but was wondering if anyone could shed any light on what might have happened, or maybe have a recovery strategy (obv. we're not paying for forensic recovery, but it would be nice to know if anything else is available to the consumers now!)
I started with the obvious stuff - downloaded the WD diagnostic software (dos) and ran a quick check which showed no problems (I will be running a long test over night tonight to make sure)
The drive shows up as unpartitioned (and remains so!)- but I had to initialize it (hope this didn't cause any damage!). I have tried all of the programmes suggested here (Spinrite, GetDataBack, Stellar Phoenix Recovery Plus, to name a few.) The purely 'recovery' programmes report 'no files found'. The disk readers (DiscExplorer for FAT32/NTFS and others) show something strange. The opening sectors of the drive contain only the message stating that no OS is loaded on the disc, followed by a significant amount of nothing (no boot sector/mbr/file system etc) Then about 50Gb in (guessing) it changes from '00' to 'FF' (in the hex view) or 'EOF' (end of file) in the text/FAT 16 view. It appears that 90% of the HDD has been overwritten with 'FF' unless I'm misreading something here?
I've pretty much given up any hope of retrieving the data, but was wondering if anyone could shed any light on what might have happened, or maybe have a recovery strategy (obv. we're not paying for forensic recovery, but it would be nice to know if anything else is available to the consumers now!)