HD Data Recovery

[Terry Smythe]

My daughter has just suffered her first (hopefully last) hard drive crash.
The drive has lost its partition data and can no longer be seen.
Notwithstanding the presence in her computer of a CD burner, she never
backed up anything. As a consequence she has lost 3 years of cherished
photos of her kids growing up.

By chance, is there some kind of utility or suite of utilities out there
that might be able to access this drive, an IDE Fujitsu MPE3136AT, 5400rpm?
I've checked the Fujitsu site but they have no recovery software available,
simple referral to commercial data recovery services.

Thoughts of others......?

Regards,

Terry Smythe
Winnipeg, Canada

 

[Ricky]

Here's one I used on a formatted disk and it recovered all the files. You
can download a trial version and if it finds them then you can buy it.
http://www.runtime.org/

 

[Terry Smythe]

Here's one I used on a formatted disk and it recovered all the files. You
can download a trial version and if it finds them then you can buy it.
http://www.runtime.org/

Thank you for the tip, appreciated. It started me on the right track
which ultimately led me to a site explaining FDISK, and on that site
learned for the first time about an undocumented feature of FDISK:

FDISK /MBR

This switch will rewrite the master boot record from its own backup and will
often restore a lost partition. In this case, it worked, without having
to acquire specialized software. The drive instantly became visible,
complete with all its directories and files. On her behalf, I am now
backing up all her kids' pictures and movies onto CD's, something she should
have been doing all along.

Once again, a fine example of the magic and power of the internet.

Regards,

Terry