Recovering a broken laptop hard drive

Question

So I bought a new hard drive for my laptop and at least I can boot up now. But since that works, I'm wondering how far gone my old drive is. I have data on it I need to recover (I know it should have been backed up, and there's only a week's worth of data, but it's important).

What possibilities are there?

Answer 1

You can use this to connect the laptop drive via USB to another computer:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB2IDE-N

If the drive is SATA rather than IDE, and if you have SATA ports in your computer, this won't be necessary. All you would need is a SATA cable and an available SATA power connector from your power supply.

If you need recovery software (as in, the data is missing, corrupted, or has been deleted), here's a few recommendations:

• Recouva (a freebie)
• Directory Snoop (trial, then paid)
• OnTrack EasyRecovery (trial, then paid)

Answer 2

If the suggestions from Force Flow does not work for you and the drive is dead, here is a recovery service that is very good and has the lowest prices in the industry for data recovery.

http://lowcostrecovery.com/pricing.html