HDD Crash & Restoring deleted files

[Jabberwocky]

Yesterday my external HDD crashed, and along with it 400gb of stuff. Luckily I moved those files recently from my internal HDD So It shouldn`t be a problem to recover the data on my internal. Found a freeware data recovery tool that sees all of the deleted files. (minitool power data recovery)

My worry is that when it "saves" the files it will overwrite other sections of the HDD, thus rendering it impossible to recover half of the stuff. It even warns about this.

Logic tells me that it should recover the data in-place by just "tagging" it as not deleted anymore. Besides, I don`t have 400gb free on another HDD

Should I trust my instinct, or go with what the software says?

 

[ponder]

NEVER recover data to the same drive you are trying to recover from. ALWAYS recover to a different drive.

 

[Jabberwocky]

So I shook the HDD, and now it works again

Yeah, I gave it a shake... thought "not gonna get the warranty because the recept is gone so why not... maybe theres a 1 in a 1 000 000 000 chance that it will work"
Going to do a scandisk now to assess the damage

 

[Kuga]

Get an app called GetDataBack (duh) and then recover the data. What ponder said, get a different drive to recover the data to. Once you start overwriting files on the crashed disk/partition files will start disappearing.

 

[HavocXphere]

So I shook the HDD, and now it works again

Haha.

Lose the drive though. Once a hdd crashes, its never any good again.