Hard Disk Repair Software

[Debbie]

Any sugestions for a good hard disk repair software please ?
I don't belive in them much but I have a hard disk that has been replaced and before disposing
of it I would like to give it a try.

[UtwigMU]

It depends if the HDD is still having signs of live and is being seen by BIOS. In that case I recommend getting another same or bigger HDD and first doing dd_rescue (boot from Knoppix, do "fdisk -l" to find out which HDD is which, then "dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb" with sda being your old drive and sdb being your new drive. This will copy everything readable (usually skips less than 1MB of bad sectors) to new drive, where you can then start data recovery with software such as Ontrack Easy recovery.

You can also try Spinrite.

If there are no signs of life, you can try buying same model and firmware working drive and transfering PCB from one to another. I fried a disk by mounting PCB from same generation 40GB Seagate to 60GB Seagate.

Sending it in for recovery is last resort and it cost ~600€ when I got a quote from Ontrack Germany once.

[Tom]

I once read that putting the hard drive in a freezer for a few
days will bring it "back to life" for a short period of time.
I tried this and was amazed that this method worked.
I was able to access the previously dead drive and
able to recover some very important family pictures.
You have to be fast and you will only get one try at it,
but it's definitely worth an attempt. I was able to access the
data on the hard drive for about ten minutes until it died for good.
I used a USB hard drive adapter and rested the
drive on a tray of ice cubes while I did this.

[Dr Mordrid]

Freezer can work, have used it a few times with a 50+% success rate. As for recovering contents from a disc that has lost its marbles but still spins up and most other media including RAID's: File Scavenger 3.2.

Had a USB drive that got really scrambled up with >100g of important stuff on it and it recovered the vast majority of it. Trick was to FDISK the drive, removing all partition data, then turn File Scavenger loose on it. MUST have a target recovery disc at least as large as the source discs contents as it'll try to recover everything.