My desktop's motherboard recently died and I decided to salvage its 2 500GB HDDs while I save up for a new mobo. I bought a docking station to use with my laptop. One HDD works flawlessly; however the other won't. It showed up in Disk Management as "invalid" but it wouldn't show up at all in My Computer. I did a bit of research and I found out you could trick Windows into recognizing the drive by using HXD (a hex editor) to change the HDD's status from dynamic to basic.
It worked. Somewhat. It showed up in My Computer but it said it needed to be formatted. Of course I declined, I really need the data on the broken HDD. (Years worth of pics and videos, my bad for not having a backup) I used testdisk to check if I could recover the partitions. it said it could recover all the partitions EXCEPT for the one with the photos on it.
Is there anyway to recover the data, short of going to a data recovery service?
Many thanks! :D