Recovery software

scottmuir424 · 4 Apr 2012 at 11:43

Whats best recovery siftware for damaged hdd

Cheers

edscdk · 4 Apr 2012 at 11:46

dammaged as in dropped down the stairs or dammaged as is some bad sectors / corrupt fs?

www.piriform.com rescuv

bledd · 4 Apr 2012 at 12:26

getdatabackforntfs
filescavenger

both not free

Mr Blonde · 4 Apr 2012 at 15:05

edscdk said:
www.piriform.com rescuv

Recuva? : http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Nightglow · 4 Apr 2012 at 15:10

+1 Recuva.

Never failed me yet.

scottmuir424 · 4 Apr 2012 at 19:21

Laptop feel from couch wont access OS struggling to find pics, laptop belongs to a neighbour just to see if i can do anything to recover data done a scan on hdtune it looks quit bad lots of red dots

davetherave2 · 4 Apr 2012 at 19:41

i've always found recover my files is a great program has saved me a number of times.

recuva is also a great bit of software so +1 for that.

nick1988 · 4 Apr 2012 at 20:15

ZAR (Zero assumption recovery) has always been great for me! Also might be worth pulling the HD out and plugging it to a test machine and then run a linux live cd and see if you can mount the volume to pull the data off it that way.

Pho · 4 Apr 2012 at 20:25

PhotoRec, free and very good.

(it doesn't just do photos like its name suggests).

Philtor · 4 Apr 2012 at 21:10

No one mentioned TestDisk? It's superb (and free like Recuva)

Craig321 · 4 Apr 2012 at 21:12

Recuva will do the job, but it tends to restore duplicates of every file, so it's not great if you're restoring a whole disk or lots of folders.

EasyRecovery Pro is very good. The ones mentioned above all do a good job as well.

scottmuir424 · 5 Apr 2012 at 00:25

many thanks guys will give it a try

Sin_Chase · 5 Apr 2012 at 01:18

PhotoRec/testdisk

this_is_gav · 5 Apr 2012 at 09:38

nick1988 said:
ZAR (Zero assumption recovery) has always been great for me! Also might be worth pulling the HD out and plugging it to a test machine and then run a linux live cd and see if you can mount the volume to pull the data off it that way.

Yup, I've always had the most joy with this one.

That said, if the drive is damaged to the point of a physically damaged platter, then you might be better off with a specialised recovery firm. There's only so much a piece of software will be able to do about a hardware failure and potentially you'll only be making things worse if there's little bits of hard drive floating around inside the HDD casing.

RoosterC · 16 Jul 2015 at 06:47

Thank you all so much for the Recuva recommendation. Worked a treat for an HDD that couldn't be recognised.