Is there any private one out there? I have an HDD which doesn’t initialize. Read somewhere that perhaps data recovery is possible with an issue like this, and its still showing up in disk management so it not completely dead yet. Any suggestions?
Last time I had this issue, I went to a local computer repair shop. They have expertise and the equipment to do this right. I didn’t want to further brick my stuff myself doing the wrong thing by mistake.
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Maybe try this:
Unfortunately not an option in my city. I could send it to another, but I haven’t decided on that yet. I also don’t want anyone else to see the data, so there’s that too
Thanks
Thanks, will look into it
Tools that I can personally recommend because I’ve successfully tried both
DMDE Professional tool, you can only see what it can recover for free. (paid)
Autopsy open source digital Forensics (free)
There are other recommended solutions, but they can be quite expensive. It’s important to note that before you start working on the HDD, you should clone the disk first and use that image for data analysis. This way, if anything goes wrong, the original disk remains untouched.
I had been using IsoBuster for years to recover data from optical media, but it also supports hard disks:
Last time my friend had this issue, I used Recuva free version and had great success with it:
I had to run it over night and some video files were corrupted, but I was able to restore almost everything and backed up to a new hard drive.
This was some time before the pandemic (maybe 10? years ago) so I’m not sure how good this software is now, especially when I don’t use Windows anymore. But if it were to happen again, I would try out this software first before looking for anything else.
Microsoft have a free tool available you can download from the Microsoft Store called Windows File Recovery - Windows File Recovery - Microsoft Support
Haven’t used it myself, so can’t comment on how effective it is.
Vouching for this one has it has saved me a couples of times a long time ago.