Does anyone know of freeware which can diagnose & recognize an already
crashed hard disk on an IBM laptop?
My kid's IBM laptop hard disk "stopped working" (it had been making noise,
he said).
- The IBM laptop would not boot no matter what I tried
- I put the laptop hard disk in a different working laptop - same thing
- In a 2nd IBM laptop as a 2nd disk - it still wasn't recognized.
(Even though it was a second disk in a second bay, the good laptop would
not boot, saying "Operating System not found" even though it was clearly
the second disk.)
I figured I'd see if I could be a hero and save his lost photos and email.
After googling, I bought a Vantec "SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter" and
connected the crashed laptop IDE hard disk to the USB port of a second
(good) laptop. The hard disk would not be seen, even when I used the WinXP
"Disk Management" utility found by right-clicking on My Computer. (A second
hard disk worked fine so I know the Vantec IDE-to-USB adapter was working.)
After googling some more, and with the laptop 2.5" IDE hard disk externally
tied to the USB port of a good computer, I tried using the TestDisk &
PhotoRec 6.9-WIP, Data Recovery freeware (from
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download) - but "TestDisk" also did
not see the hard disk attached to the USB port via the Vantec adapter.
Googling some more, I downloaded PCWorld's "Recover Data for Fat & NTFS"
shareware at
"http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,66229-order,1-page,1/description.html
At least this program recognized the good disk (disk 0) and the bad disk
attached to the Vantec IDE-to-USB adapter (disk 1) - but PCWorld's program
said the crashed hard disk was zero size:
- Physical Disk Number: 1
- Model: USB Device
- Media Type: Fixed hard disk media
- Cylinder: 0
- Head: 0
- Sectors Per Track: 0
- Disk Size: 0MB
And, when I tried to recover data, PCWorld's Recover Data program said
"Encountered Bad Sector(s) while reading disk."
Digging further, I found PC Magazine recommended PC Inspector
(
http://pcmag.ph/hard-disk/recovering...rd-disk-crash/) for freeware
hard disk recovery after crashes.
I even put the hard drive in a zip-lock bag in the freezer (based on google
results) but nothing changed when I repeated the tests.
QUESTION:
What hard-drive crash-recovery WinXP freeware do you recommend which will
diagnose a hard drive and perhaps recover some of the lost files?