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Need help on recovering photos from crashed hard drive


8 years 6 months ago #457328 by Cory J
My brother just called me and said his hard drive crashed and he's trying to figure out how to recover all his photos that were on the drive.  Apparently these are all family photos including of his two little girls from birth to 3 and 4 years old now.  

Any idea how these photos can be recovered? 
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8 years 6 months ago #457334 by effron
If it was indeed a HD crash, he might be out of luck. Maybe contact the manufacturer and ask for advice. There are also companies that advertise recovery, but I don't know of anyone that's had success with one. I lost a bunch of photos due to a failure a few years ago and the lesson was learned well. Back up, back up, back up.....
Why so serious?
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8 years 6 months ago #457383 by Stanly
:agree:  I would have hard drive experts look at that drive.  They would know pretty quick.
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8 years 6 months ago #457401 by Shadowfixer1
A lot depends on what you mean by crash. If the hard drive is not physically damaged there is a good chance you can get the information back. DO NOT try to format the drive! If the drive is still operating purchase a good recovery software. There are some cheap ones and some that are more expensive. I would research them and purchase one that will recover the files with "names intact". Most recovery software will recover the files but they will just come up as a number. I had to purchase software like this 3 or 4 years ago. I don't recall the name but it's on this site somewhere in another discussion on the topic. Professional recovery by an outside source is very expensive and there are usually no guarantees.

If the drive is not working at all but the platters inside are not damaged, I knew of one guy that bought the exact same drive as the bad drive and carefully removed the platters from the old drive and put them into the new drive and it worked long enough to copy the information off the platters. That is the most extreme case I personally know of. Good Luck.
www.betterphoto.com/?ramshots
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8 years 6 months ago #457492 by cybersholt
I forgot to add this, great program and a must have just incase.  https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm  You just create a boot disk, boot into that and set it to recover. Can take minutes or days depends on how bad off it is.
Thank you for making PhotographyTalk.com your photography community of choice.
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8 years 6 months ago #457585 by Joves
As was said depends on what you mean by crashing. Is it a case of the drive quit spinning? Or will it just not boot into the OS? Or is it the dreaded endless clicking when it does try to boot? Each has its own solutions. I have had it where all I did was setup a new drive as the master, and the old as the slave. Then I accessed the old drives files since it was still operating for short periods with bad bearings. I have also frozen drives overnight, but that method is more a case of luck most of the time.
But if he is not all that good with working on all things technical, then it should be taken to a data recovery shop.
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