Recovering Data from External Hard Drive

[[H]ard Texan]

I was reformatting my notebook in December and used a WD 40GB hard drive in an external enclosure to backup some important info....which seems to have been a mistake...

The drive worked fine before and after the installation of XP, and it wasn't until I tried installing SP2 from the external drive that I got an error. It said that data couldn't be read, then Windows took a dump. After a reboot, I could still see the drive in My Computer, but I could not access it for the life of me.

Recently, I tried a couple of utilities such as Western Digital's Diagnostics, TESTDISK, etc...but still no dice. TESTDISK will recognize a drive is there, but it isn't able to view any files on the drive....

Any suggestions? Or should I just RMA the drive...got pretty lucky, the drive was purchased in 2002, old skewl HD with a 3 year warranty....

 

[kuyaglen]

Try using the external hdd on another computer, if that provides nothing then...File Scavenger.

 

[[H]ard Texan]

Do you know of any freeware alternatives to File Scavenger?

 

[animeguru]

I've used PC File Inspector with good results, and its free. Might want to give that a shot.

 

[[H]ard Texan]

I have actually tried PC File Inspector with no results. The only application that I have any results so far is File Scavenger. At least with File Scavenger, I could see some of my files, but PC File Inspector did nothing.