Hard Drive Crashed - Help Recovering Files!

My 500GB external hard drive (Hitachi DeskStar) crashed! The blue light comes on, and I can hear the hard drive spinning, then sounds like it's stuck, or clicking ...

Same thing happens to the internal HD on my iBook G4. Sometimes the internal HD works, sometimes not.

I desparately need to find someway to attempt to either fix the external 500GB HD, or recover the files. The 500GB was my main HD, and I have so much very important data that I need to recover (no backups!).

I have years of research (lots of family history), thousands of pictures (many very old), my personal journals that I've been keeping for years, personal information, letters, documents, family videos, and all of my e-mail.

Somebody was telling me that there is special software that will recognize the HD, and allow you to recover the files.

What would you recommend? At the present I have no money to do anything, but will save up for the recovery software. My uncle is getting me a new hard drive, so I'll have that to back up the files when I have the recovery software ...

Amazon.com: Data Rescue 3: Software

That software (or version 2 to be exact) has saved me many times, including last night.

baggss said:

Amazon.com: Data Rescue 3: Software

That software (or version 2 to be exact) has saved me many times, including last night.

Click to expand...

Exactly how did Data Rescue 3 help? Was your HD like mine, not showing up on the destop? Making sounds like it's stuck, or clicking?

I tried Disk Warrior 4, but my HD still did not show up in the Disk Warrior window.

Yes, some of the drives have been like that.

The hard drive(s) in question generally fail to mount (show up on the desktop) or even show in Disc Utility (have you tried that?). That software can find discs that your Mac won't even read and extract data from them for you.

Over the last few years I've had exactly one out of maybe 10 drives I've used this software on that it has not been able to access. This won't help with every drive, but it's been very effective for me.

baggss said:

Yes, some of the drives have been like that.

The hard drive(s) in question generally fail to mount (show up on the desktop) or even show in Disc Utility (have you tried that?). That software can find discs that your Mac won't even read and extract data from them for you.

Over the last few years I've had exactly one out of maybe 10 drives I've used this software on that it has not been able to access. This won't help with every drive, but it's been very effective for me.

Click to expand...

I tried Disk Utility, but the drive is not recognized. I called Drive Savers today (recommended by our local Apple dealer). They would normally charge from $700-$2700, but with my educator's discount, the cost would be between $630 and $1787! They will check the drive and tell me what the cost would be for no charge, even if I choose to not have them recover the data.

I'm going to buy either Data Rescue 3 or Drive Genius 2 (perhaps both) and see if I can recover the data myself. Otherwise, I'll save up to send the drive in to Drive Savers.

I used DATA Rescue 2 to read my old hard drive that I removed from my powerbook. I hooked it up to my G5 via usb and was able to get all my data off it. Give it a try.