msg wrote:

James Sweet wrote:
Eeyore wrote:

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I
restarted Windows (XP btw FWIW).

There's some really good tools out there, unfortunately I forget the name of
the one I used, but I found a free demo of it online a couple years ago.

I recommend tools from Ontrack (A well-known hard disk software and data
recovery company located here in my home state);

They're still around ?

I have used Ontrack tools in the past but I imagined they'd gone the way of all
things.


I frequently use ODRN (Ontrack Data Recovery for Netware) and it has worked
wonders
to salvage file systems despite significant bad blocks and failing servo
tracks. There are other versions of ODR for other O/S platforms.
FWIW I also use an antique version of Norton Diskedit (DOS) to work at
the sector level on scsi drives.

Yes. If only a modern OS would let you do that !

I well recall a specific instance where I'd goofed slightly due to poor
documentation (jumper settings in the early days of IDE master/slave drives) and
thankfully didn't panic and **** up. Norton sorted it. But then again, Norton
wasn't Symantec back in those days.

Don't you love it when Norton says 'this drive has a damaged partition table.
Would you like to recover it ?'

Graham