I suffered the same horror, and a tech opened the drive using Linux and recovered the files with a $99 program (forget the name). Unfortunately all folder groupings and folder/filenames were lost, but all files were there. 

Rob

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Art Heimsoth 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] HDD failure problem


A couple of things that have worked for me in the past..

If your HDD is NOT SATA, then you can get the SpinRite package from
grc.com and use it to identify any bad sectors on your drive and attempt
to recover the data on them.  Once that is done, you *may* be able
to again see the HDD with Windows.  If your HDD is SATA, then there 
are adapters you can use to attach it to a EIDE interface on another
system with EIDE interfaces and do the same.

There also is a program (need to buy for ~$30) that will scan you disk
and attempt to identify the files there and recover them.  The HDD need
not be online to Windows to do this, it will work at the drive level.  This
is Restorer Ultimate  from bitmart.net and has worked for me a couple
of times.

Art Heimsoth

> A few weeks ago, my new Sony Vaio AW-290JAH Windows Vista Home
> premium started behaving erratically. At first it simply gave me a
> BSOD and then restarted, but after about 4 BSOD's it was taking 2
> and 3 tries to get it to boot up properly. At this point I decided
> I needed to get all of my data off of my HDD onto an external and
> figure out where to go from there. About 5 min into the file
> transfer, my laptop crashed and refused all attempts to re-boot. I
> talked to tech support at Sony and they told my to buy the recovery
> disks and see if I could repair the windows installation. The
> recovery disks were a complete failure. I then had Sony simply send
> me a new HDD. This means that my computer is now working, but I
> still don't have any of my data. I have 8-10gb of data stuck on my
> trashed HDD. I also tried to boot my computer by making a VistaPE
> boot disk from my newly installed HDD. It would boot up, but the
> old HDD would not show up as a hard drive. I also tried hooking it
> up through a external enclosure, to no avail. I am thinking that
> the actual mechanical part of the HDD is what is broken, not the
> software/drivers on it. I have contacted Sony and have a name of a
> data retrieval company that will take my drive apart in a clean
> room and manually read the data off of it. However, this is bound
> to be expensive. I am open to any ideas on how to fix this problem
> myself (short of building a clean room...) Alex Kammann
>

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