Hard Drive Recovery?

[charlie]

I have a hard drive (PC) that I used in an eSATA dock a hand full of times. The drive failed and can not be read when in the eSATA dock, in an external USB case, or when installed back into the computer. The computer treats it as a new hard drive that needs to be partitioned and reformatted. Hard drives fail all the time of course but I'm suspicious that the eSATA dock played a role in this(?)

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions to recovering files from a drive in this condition. The drive powers up and spins and doesn't make any funny noises. I've tried diskdrill but it was unable to recover anything. It is not worth spending hundreds of dollars to have the data recovered as it was purely a photograph storage hard drive and all of the original nef files are backed up, though some edited tiff/psd files and some film scans did slip through the cracks, so I thought I'd give it a try to recover them. 

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Try Recuva. It has helped me on occasion even when the PC reported the drive being unformatted. I believe the basic version is free.

You need to have another drive of the same or bigger capacity to copy saved files to.

R-Studio might be better, but is not free software.

[Hugh_3170]

Charlie, it might be worth transplanting the hard drive into a USB enclosure and seeing if that helps.  I have had more trouble with eSata enclosures than those for USB.

It sounds as if the HDD unit is not making any strange noises, so if the drive is still not able to work in an USB enclosure don't overlook the possiblity that the PCB on the drive itself has failed.  I have had a Canadian company rebuild these PCBs for me with good success - basically they copy the firmware and the unique good/bad sector and disk performance data that pertains to each individual HDD drive into a new PCB.  You only need to send them the old PCB.

But I would try a USB enclosure first.  Hope this helps.

[charlie]

Bjørn, thank you for the suggestions. I will give recuva a try and then R-studio if that doesn't work, which lets you scan the hard drive and shows if it finds anything then you must purchase the license to recover it.

Hugh, thanks for the insight. I have already tried it in a USB enclosure as well as reinstalling it back into the computer. No luck.