I have been asked how to recover information from a hard drive that crashed or that you can not seem to gain access to.
First I want to say that there could be times that so much damage has been done to the hard drive that you will not even be able to see the drive letter in Windows. The causes for this could be numerous. Some of the main causes could be that a virus, spy-ware or other program may have destroyed the information need to access the drive. It also could be mechanically bad. In these extreme cases you better hope that you backed up any critical data. If you want to get information off of a badly damaged drive it will require you to send it to a company that can recover it. This is normally very expensive and could cost several hundred or several thousand dollars depending on a number of criteria.
This being said try this: You need to put your “bad” drive on a working computer. Be sure the computer is turned off and unplugged. The drive must be set up as slave in order to work. Attach the drive to a ribbon cable and then attach the power cable from the power supply. After you are sure you have everything plugged in boot the computer. After the computer goes to the desktop you should see it loading the new (bad) drive in the lower right hand corner of the desktop. Right click “start” and pick “Explorer”. Once you open that window you should see the drive letter you need. If you do not see it it could be possible that your drive is so badly damaged that it can not be accessed. Another thing to check is to be sure you had set the jumper on the drive to slave. Also double check to see that the ribbon cable and power cable are both securely attached to the drive.
Try to find what you are looking for and either copy it to your current hard drive or cut it to a CD. I use a USB drive most of the time.
I hope this helps somebody. It should be noted that this could be different in certain computers and operating systems. It is better to try this than to buy expensive software that may not work.
CAUTION!!! If you do use special software it could be destructive. That is to say, if you don’t get what you need off the first time the software will make the drive inaccessible. This would not be good!!!! Try to do a backup first.