[Twinbird]

I have a Hitachi 160GB notebook HDD, it was dropped while still inside a Toshiba laptop and is no longer responding. Windows 7 doesn't recognize it on my machines, and when I plug it into my desktop directly with a SATA cable, my PC freezes and won't boot if restarted while the HDD is connected. It doesn't freeze when I connect the HDD via a SATA-USB adapter. The only program that can recognize it is HDD Regenerator, but it sees it as "0" Mb and when I try to repair the HDD, the program tells me the master boot record is damaged. I need to get some music off this hard drive.

Do you guys have any suggestions? Is the HDD gone? (I don't wan't to pay $1000+ to take the data off).

Thanks!

Edited by Twinbird, 04 January 2011 - 05:46 PM.

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Let's say it doesn't sound very promising from what you've described.
Toshiba don't currently supply any testing software for their drives, but you can instead use "Seagate SeaTools for DOS" which, according to Seagate, can be used to test any make of drive. Download the ISO file (link below) & make a bootable CD from it using Nero or similar. Then boot your laptop from it and test the drive. The outcome may be a foregone conclusion - any reports of "Failed" during or after testing means the contents of the drive are beyond software recovery methods and only a data recovery service has any chance of getting anything off it.
SeaTools for DOS: http://www.seagate.c...loads/seatools/

Edited by phillipcorcoran, 05 January 2011 - 03:32 PM.

[phillipcorcoran]

Let's say it doesn't sound very promising from what you've described.
Toshiba don't currently supply any testing software for their drives, but you can instead use "Seagate SeaTools for DOS" which, according to Seagate, can be used to test any make of drive. Download the ISO file (link below) & make a bootable CD from it using Nero or similar. Then boot your laptop from it and test the drive. The outcome may be a foregone conclusion - any reports of "Failed" during or after testing means the contents of the drive are beyond software recovery methods and only a data recovery service has any chance of getting anything off it.
SeaTools for DOS: http://www.seagate.c...loads/seatools/

Edited by phillipcorcoran, 05 January 2011 - 03:32 PM.

[gregrulez]

Might be useful at this point to just quickly list the software you have tried that hasn't recognised your drive. That way people know what you have and haven't done/tried yet.

[Twinbird]

Thanks for the replies, I've downloaded a testing tool for Hitachi drives (haven't used it yet though). Anyways I will list the programs below, but the drive is dead, nothing is even recognizing it anymore.
HDD Regenerator
PC Inspector File Recovery
EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard

There are a couple others too, but they didn't work and the HDD is beyond damage for any software to fix.

[gregrulez]

You could always try using testDisk.
If you download it from here.

Run it by extracting the files anywhere you want (that you can find), go into the win directory, and run testdisk_win.exe
When the window loads, select [no log], it isn't that useful to create a log.

After the last step you should see a list of hard drives. If you see it, we are in business.

Select the correct disk (by size usually, tho if you know the serial number that works too), and hit Enter to proceed.
At the next screen hit Enter again, which should select [Intel] for the partition table type.

Next, select [analyse] and see if any partitions are shown, if so post back and i will carry on