External Hard Drive Data "Recovery"

[lloydkayak]

I have a Toshiba 320G External -
I am under the impression that something has happened to corrput data on the disk. Data writes fine and the disk is fully picked up when plugged in showing all folders etc. However, when I try to access the videos or iso's the data won't read.

I tried copying off the harddrive and after it reaches 15% or so the process hangs.

Is there any software I could use to recover the data and would formatiing the disk likely fixz this problem. The hard drive is still under warranty and is the 2.5 inch variety.

 

[grok]

Did you rip the videos yourself? Had a similar problem lately where the rip would finish successful but once I try a copy the ripped files I got CRC errors. I figured probably some copy-protection issue and upgrading dvdfab to the latest version seemed to fix the problem.

 

[lloydkayak]

I found MiniTool Power Data REcovery off the Gizmo's freeware website... Seems to be working, faster on some stuff but hopefully will recover most of what I need

 

[LazyLion]

http://techpp.com/2010/07/22/best-free-data-recovery-software/

* How many times have you deleted something from your hard-disk and immediately realized you made a mistake
* How many times have you shift-deleted something really important, only to bang your head on the keyboard later?
* How many times have you wished you could un-delete a file from USB drive?

I am sure many of you know about File recovery software available in the market. But do you realize the concept behind File recovery tools? Gizmo‘s explain this beautifully.

Any data on Windows system is written to the hard-disk and once you decide to delete it, all the space occupied by the data is marked for re-use. File recovery relies on the fact that when a user deletes a file the contents of the file aren’t physically wiped out on the disk, but rather the file is simply flagged as deleted. On simpler terms, the space is simply marked for reuse. This means that the older the file, the less chance there is of successful recovery because it’s more likely to have been overwritten by another newer file.

File recovery software works best when the deleted files are recovered to another drive. That’s because the very act of recovery involves writing to your drive, and you don’t want to write over other files that still need to be recovered. The other drive can be another partition of the same disk or even an external drive.

Another important thing to understand is that the Recovery programs operate more successfully if they are installed before any file recovery is attempted (If you have come to this article from Google, more likely you haven’t installed a recovery software.) Remember that recovery software cannot undelete files that have been written over.

Recovering data from physically damaged drives is also beyond the capabilities of most free recovery tools. There are some expensive commercial products which claim to recover any data completely even from a physically damaged disk. But remember, costlier doesn’t always mean better.

With this in mind, let us discuss about some of the top Data recovery tools available for free.