HDD Recovery software

Hello, I was wondering if anyone can help me recover info from a HDD. The laptop of one of my bosses had a HDD crashed on it. It all started on Saturday at noon. He gets a BSOD when trying to log in and he has to reboot again and BSOD again and so on. The disk has two partitions: One is like the Program Files folder and the other is where the data is stored. The PF partition works ok but the documents partition does not. There are several bad sectors on the HDD and this is probably the reason why it doesn't boot anymore. Is there a way to access the information on the document partition??? We have already enclosing it and reading as an external drive but doesnt work. Any suggestions or software would be appreciated.

 

A linux box with NTFS support (there may be a hack involved there) might work. I had a co-worker recover from a broken Windows partition because of that. Only a suggestion if the data is that valuable; I've never used Linux like that.

 

You can use this, if you don't mind a pay program:
http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm

Here is a free one...can't verify the respectability or reliability of the program, but it sounds promising...

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,23069-order,1-page,1-c,utilities/description.html#

 

Wow! Quick replies! Nice. I forgot to mention that when trying to access it, it gives an error: "Error performing inpage operation".

 

PC World, I THINK is a respectible magazine. I would say their utiliity might be worth a shot.

 

I like PC Mag, but it's not their utility. They just have a link, or a download, on their software site. If they host it, I guess it couldn't be bad. But, I didn't want to make it sound like I'm an expert on this program. The only one I've used for recovery is Get Data Back, which is pay-for.

 

I've have a pay-for program called "Recover My Files", which is what I used to recover about 3.5GB of personal data from an accidental re-format of my data partition.

100% successful too (each and every file was fine)...but Windows at least recognized the drive before I started recovery.

 

I'd suggest a Linux box, using it the same way as an external drive, and pulling the data off that way. I've done that before with dead drives, and it tends to read the info better than anything Windows will do. You might get some other utilities that do it, but I trust open source more.

 

Thanks for the tips, I read that Knoppix does the job but I'm completely noob when it comes to Linux Might look unto the Windows programs you guys recommended.

 

A couple things you may try if the others don't serve you:

There's a program called Spinrite. It's $90 iirc, but it's quite good for low level data recovery. I've used it with success to fix a couple pretty messed up drives.

There was some linux based recovery cd I tried... either System Rescue CD or the Ultimate Boot CD. It had a program to rebuild the boot sector, which saved me another drive. UBCD has a number of useful diagnostics too. I don't think that's your problem though. Of course try mounting in linux first, since that's easiest.