Hard drive recovery

[BTGBullseye]

I used to have utilities that would sometimes work for this, but they were last functional on a Windows 2000 system...

 

Here's the issue, my external drive is head thrashing any time my system tries to access it, that effectively renders the drive unusable. I need something that will recognize it properly, (USB enclosure, so it has to be able to recognize it through a USB connection as well) and be able to recover information from the drive. (or at least attempt to)

 

Anyone have any tools that can do this?

[sheridanm962]

You can use Autopsy or Paladin (Paladin is an Ubuntu based Data Recovery OS).

 

http://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/

http://www.sumuri.com/products/paladin/

 

I'm currently in an IT course that focuses on data recovery, networking, servers and scripting (oh god not scripting...). The last resort is something called a DeepSpar.

 

As for the physical side of things I'm still hard pressed on live disks as I still need practice (crashed heads, scratching platters etc). We have to make DIY head protectors made from pill packets... So yeah, really headache inducing stuff.

 

To do this yourself would be very gut wrenching to say the least.

[BTGBullseye]

I'll see if Paladin has the hardware analysis stuff I need, but I know Autopsy does not. Autopsy is primarily for functioning drives that have data corruption or deletion, not head thrashing. (it's part of my current toolkit already)