I'm trying to retrieve damaged data from a external USB hard drive. Windows reports the drive to be empty (!), but I tried a demo copy of Stellar Pheonix Data Recovery utility and it can find data on the drive. However, the software costs around

Have you got a Mac/*nix box you can stick it on? I sometimes find these are better at reading dodgy disks than Windows...

Rob.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

You can get a free Live CD in here.

Download the ISO, burn it to CD, pout the CD in the drive and reboot the system and you have one instant linux box

If you can't get your data in that then you will have ot buy the software.

If your data is important I suggest you pay

And as has been discussed on here recently , www.retrodata.co.uk are excellent at sorting this sort of thing out

I've used Easy Recovery 6.04 a couple of times. Even used it on my camera

Can remeber how much it cost. I found a copy

To put it in perspective,

Thanks for the responses guys. I'll take this all on board and make a decision, one way or another

Steve

Have you tried taking the drive out of the USB box, setting as slave and connecting direct to the motherboard.

Ive had this a couple of times with my Maxtor external drive and that solved the problem.

It could be the USB interface in the external box that gone wrong.

Pay for it??? I downloaded mine for free off bittorrent

Pay for it??? I downloaded mine for free off bittorrent

Which program did you use to recover your data?

Steve

As a seriosu point you don't know the validity of the torrent files so there could be a worm or some other code on it. If your data is worth enough that it is worth recovering I would not be taking any chances

A valid point, yes - I was actually more interested in which program he used though, not where he got it from.

Steve