Recover data from partially corrupted HDD

[eggrock]

I have a 250Gb WD Caviar HDD that I'm trying to recover data from. I don't think this will be too difficult but I don't know what utility to look for--please pardon my data recovery noobishness.

The symptoms are:

- Windows does not see the drive at all.

- WD Lifeguard Tools (run from Windows) doesn't see the drive. I haven't tried booting to the WD tools CD yet.

- BIOS recognizes the drive (including the model #) after a delay of around a minute.

- One of the Ultimate Boot CDs disk checking apps. sees the drive but can't determine the drive letter. (There's a 'check all' option in the utility that I haven't tried yet.)

If there's a utility that can reset the drive letter and whatever else is associate with it? If so I think recovery is as simple as doing that and then running chkdsk to fix errors. Can one of the data recovery apps. do that?

 

[houkouonchi]

if the bios slowly recognizes the drive then it sounds like the drive is failling. I would use a linux live cd to see if you can mount the data and if so copy whatever you can to another drive, then run a chkdisk and see if you can access it in windows

 

[eggrock]

Sounds like a plan, thanks. Any recommendations? UBCD (Linux flavor) is the obvious choice. SystemRescueCD?

 

[eggrock]

Well this might not work out so well. I ran one of the scans (check for bad sectors only) and in ~12 hours it only checked ~55k sectors out of 488,000,000. Over 18k were bad. Dammit.