The HDD in my brother's PC went all to shit today. His computer wouldn't boot past the BIOS screen but is still recognized by the BIOS itself. He connected it as a slave drive in another PC. The drive showed up in MY Computer, but was shown as having 0 MBs free and a RAW file system. I'm thinking that the boot sector was corrupted. Can anyone recommend any recovery tools or methods to get his HDD up and running again? Thanks!

1/18/2006 9:07:30 PM

I had a dying hard drive once, and had success recovering the files by using Easy Recovery Pro. I think it's pretty powerful software so you might want to give it a try.

1/18/2006 10:13:07 PM

its all like $60-$80, just pic one

i've had good luck with undelete tho

1/18/2006 10:23:06 PM

or you can recover it with an old version of mbrwork for FREE.

1/18/2006 11:19:41 PM

Those tools look promising. Anyone else have any other suggestions?

1/19/2006 1:48:00 PM

http://www.download.com/PC-Inspector-File-Recovery/3000-2248_4-10118664.html?tag=lst-0-6

I've used this one once. Worked well for me and it's free.

[Edited on January 19, 2006 at 2:19 PM. Reason : l]

1/19/2006 2:19:04 PM

^ That looks like a nice tool. However, download.com says:

"PC Inspector File Recovery is a data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged (does not work with the NTFS file system). Recovers files with the original time and date stamp. Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives. "

The company website mentions no limitation for NTFS. Does anyone know if this will work for NTFS.

Also, anyone know a tool that will fix or rebuild the boot sector/partition table that is free or easy to find by "alternate methods".?

1/19/2006 8:23:34 PM