Hard drive dead

So my hard drive more or less crashed and I had to install a new one.

However, I reaalllllyyy need like 1 or 2 files from it, so I was hoping I could get it working for a minute or two but nothing. It boots up, but DISK UTILITY cant repair it.

Is there ANY WAY AT ALL that I can repair it to some extent? A program I can download? Are there people out there who do professional hard drive restoring?

Thanks for any help, much appreciated.

If the hard drive boots up you should be able to extract files from it with recovery software. However, good recovery software is expensive.

Data Rescue 3

I use Data Rescue 3 and have had good luck with it. I don't think that you will find a free or cheap alternative that will do a good job on data recovery. IMO this is one of those "good stuff isn't cheap, and cheap stuff isn't good" scenarios.

Good luck with your recovery.

Thanks for the help everyone. I have Data Recovery 3, I just need an external hookup with only one USB so that I can "clone" it onto my external harddrive. I dont wanna risk cloning it to the HD in my computer.

And I consulted a company that does HD restoration but it's thousands of dollars, so scratch that.

One more question..

I just started "cloning" my old HD to my external, but of course it's taking FOREVER. It's done about 1GB in 6 hours.

My question is, does it "clone" in any specific order? For example, is it cloning my newest stuff first? Or just whatever it can get? B/c I reallllly only need this one document that was kind of recent, and I'm obviously not going to let this thing "clone" for the next 5,000 hours or w/e it is.

Thanks for any help.

Cloning is done on a sector by sector basis. It would be next to impossible to figure out where that file is on the drive. You're just going to have to let it run its course and hope it doesn't take that long.