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Question

want to recover data on crashed Western Digital Hard Drive ?

by Dec 22, 2013 7:50PM PST

I had Windows 8 32 bit installed on a WD5000AAJS 500 GB hard drive that died on me. I had a backup of it made using the free version of Paragon Backup & Recovery. Apparently there is something wrong with the disk image so I am unable to recover from it (spent the past week trying everything I can think of or find on the internet to get the image to work). Anyways, there are some files on the hd that I would REALLY like to recover.

I can connect the HD to another PC running Win 7 and it starts to spin (no noise or excessive vibrations). The PC sees the HD as an unallocated drive with 134217728 GB when I look in Computer Management. I read somewhere that this represents the largest possible size for a Win 7 HD (something like that - I'm sure I'm wrong, though). Anyways, I was thinking that since at least the HD spins and the PC can see it, there must be some way to recover the files off of it. There is a MySQL db on there that I would like to recover and some batch and vbscript files I would like to recover.

Any help would be appreciate

Discussion is locked

2 Posts
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Answer
Re: recover data
by Forum moderator Dec 22, 2013 7:58PM PST

I'd try the recovery programs mentioned in on of the 3 top posts in the http://forums.cnet.com/storage-forum/
It also contains a link to the WD site for 10% discount on their authorised recovery companies if I remember well.

Kees

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Answer
About the backup.
by Forum moderator Dec 23, 2013 12:09AM PST

It's sad to read this tale as it happens too often. Let me skip all the usual and state it again if you backup you need more than a PROPRIETARY backup copy. You may find out that only Paragon can recover that backup copy.

And please folk, backup is not one copy. It's more than one and if you have a simple file backup such as "SYNC" you would never worry about Paragon but copy your files back home.
Bob

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