Data Recovery Software ??

[xli_ne]

My girlfriend's dad has two older pc's laying in his office that he asked me if I could get the data off of it. One, the power supply was bad and the other, he says, worked fine last week. I think they were running windows 98 or around there. Anywho, so i take out the hard drive from the dead power supply machine and set it up as a slave on the other one. Boot it up and it says the boot failure, no operating system. So I think that the jumpers weren't set right, so I check, they are set right. So I put every back the way it was before I opened up the "machine that ran last week", and I get the same boot error. Well, f-ing great. 😡 So I take both of the hard drives home and put them in an external enclosure and hook it up to my pc. Nothing, the one dead power supply hard drive doesn't spin (I couldn't remember if it was spinning before) and the other won't show up. They external enclosure does show up in the device manager, but nothing on it.

So the question is, is there any software out there to maybe get the data off of the one that does spin? (I'm just thinking that the hard drive that doesn't spin is a lost cause). I know of a few 30-40 dollar software, but wanted to check to see if anyone has tired to see if they work or not.

 

[Makosuke]

Quite some time ago (OS8 era) I used Data Rescue to recover all the data from a drive that was completely unreadable by every other utility available at the time. I haven't had the misfortune to need it since, but I assume it's still worthwhile, and the company appears to have a PC version, so they might be worth a look. They've got a free trial version, so you can find out whether it can save your stuff before you actually pay for it.

http://www.prosofteng.com/

As for the drive that doesn't spin up, that'd be a lost cause, although you might try another power supply with it (maybe put it, alone, into the semi-working PC and see if it'll spin up). You may have guessed this yourself, but I'll bet the one drive got fried when the power supply in its computer went out, and plugging it into the same bus as the working drive corrupted that one. I've seen something similar happen when an IBM Deathstar drive I had failed abruptly and totally, corrupting the other drive on the bus with it in the process.