1

I have an external hard drive that has failed. I have a ton of data on it and I am wondering if any one knows of a good freeware recovery program I could use. Its a two terabyte drive so it would cost a fortune to have some one recover and transfer the data (its full). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated thanks.

5 Spice ups
2

How important is the data?

If it’s very critical then paying for a specialist team is teally your only option.

If it’s not that important then you could try Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! but it may not help.

I’m guessing that the data isn’t that important though as you had no backup?

2 Spice ups
3

Its not life threatening but its just a lot of miscellaneous stuff old files, movies, games, and pics. The only reason I dont want to go the commercial route is because of the size of the drive. Thanks I’ll try it and see.

4

I would start with Recuva as well.

2 Spice ups
5

How did the external drive fail?

6

Random failure. Connected it one day and it wouldnt load up. Been down ever since.

7

Wouldn’t load up? I have not heard that term describing a drive.

Does it power up?

Does it spin?

Does it makes noises?

Does windows see the drive?

Does disk management see the drive?

If so, what does it tell you about the partition? NTFS? Unformatted?

Any chance anyone could have bump the drive and the drive drop?

1 Spice up
8

It starts up and disk management can see it but you cant open the drive. What I mean by wont load up is the tile image is red where it displays the share name and size of the drive.

9

Whatever you decide to do, get 2 new drives. One for the data and one as a backup. If you care about your data you should have at least 2 copies.

For recovery - you may want to try this: Get another drive of at least the same size. Boot with Hiren’s or Ultimate Boot CD and use rawcopy to dupe the drive to the new one. Do all recovery work on the new drive, to avoid making things worse on the original.

Try recuva. If it fails there are a lot of others out there, but my favorite is Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional v11.

2 Spice ups
10

I don’t know about others, but our recovery costs generally don’t depend on the amount of data. It’s really just dependent on the difficulty of the recovery. That’s something we don’t know for sure until we see it. We recover 2TB drives on a regular basis. More data means longer transfer time and more time occupying a machine but that’s definitely not the hard part and cost driver. Our engineers have lots of machines to work with. The range is pretty wide from pretty low costs to high costs because of this. Free evaluations means it doesn’t cost you to ask a recovery company for their diagnosis and see what recovery would cost. Our lowest price is $250 so if it’s not worth that to you then it’s not worth sending it. I hope this gives you a better idea of the professional recovery service option.

If it’s not making strange noises (and Disk Management seeing it) then that is probably a good sign. I hope you can get it back.