laptop hard drive recovery...

[harnar123]

so my friend lost a bunch of data recently so he had to reformat his hard drive. I had him check for errors on the hard drive and it basically just gets stuck half way through. He also has ran recovery programs (not sure which ones) and found the files but they won't let him recover them. So my question is one: can he just block the sector that is bad of the hard drive and two: know any really good data recovery programs?

 

[KurrentEweser]

Many demos tease the user by finding recoverable files but won't recover any files until the demo is unlocked. Good recovery programs allow for skipping bad sectors.


Free Data Recovery, File and Partition Recovery, Undelete and Unformat Utilities (thefreecountry.com)

 

[harnar123]

any recommendations on what would be the best?

 

[KSoD]

Pandora File Recovery - Find and recover deleted files of any type - free.

This one is fully free. It also gets a decent review.

Pandora Recovery - At A Glance - Reviews by PC Magazine
Windows Marketplace: Product details for Pandora Recovery

 

[KurrentEweser]

Since the drive was formatted, all of the files that were fragmented may never be recovered with any of the free file recovery programs. The drive should be unformated to ensure successful file recovery. None of the free programs that I know of will unformat NTFS partitions.

These will work unformatted or not.

NTFS Recovery and FAT Recovery software: Recover My Files

File Scavenger - Data Recovery Program