On November 18, 2005, my data hard drive, a 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9, started pausing mysteriously. Just as a precaution, i ran Microsoft's CHKDSK on the drive. CHKDSK found a few bad spots, claimed it corrected them, and i thought the problem was solved. I continued my work, but the pauses kept occurring. The next time i ran CHKDSK, it took much longer to run, found a lot more bad spots. Really worried now, i ran CHKDSK again, and it ran all night, painfully slowly, finding more errors the longer it ran. The next day, i killed it, and tried to look at the drive in Windows Explorer. Windows said "Drive is not formatted."
Oh no.
I looked around for the backup, 6 months old, and found it on a Maxtor 250GB external drive, with USB interface. I plugged it in, and nothing happened.
On no again.
I went on the internet looking for drive recovery software. The first thing i found was Iolo Search and Recover 3 ($40). It had a good review on Cnet. I bought it, installed and ran it, pointed it at my bad drive. It paused for a few seconds, then said "nothing found."
Well, that was a waste of $40. I wrote Iolo, told them their software didn't work, and asked for a refund. I got an automated email about how all sales are final.
Next, i looked at the professional disk recovery services. Studying the sites for DriveSavers and ActionFront, it looked liked $2000 to $3000 for them to recover the drive's data. There had to be a better way. After all, the drive was still spinning and communicating. This should be a software solution, not a salvage operation.
Next software i tried was SpinRite ($89). It had fascinating, compelling marketing, and offered a "30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee." I bought it, installed it onto a CDROM, and booted into it. The first thing it did was crash, with a screen dump of CPU registers, asking me to email them for support. I painstakingly copied down the crash dump, then tried again after removing a larger drive from my computer (a 400GB monster), guessing that perhaps the presence of the larger drive was too much for SpinRite. Sure enough, the next time SpinRite got farther. I looked through its interface trying to figure out how to tell it where to put the files it recovered. There was no such option. This was a shock: a disk recovery tool that wants to write back data to a failing drive, with no alternative? I emailed their support, with details of the crash and asking about how to write recovered files to another drive. No answer. 6 days later, i sent the email again. No answer.
At this point i was frustrated and panicking, but i did manage to get my 6-month backup drive working, by ripping it out of its external enclosure and plugging it straight into the IDE bus. So, now i had lost "only" 6 months of work. This was better than nothing. I spent a lot of time debating whether to splurge on the expensive recovery service, or just run SpinRite and hope it didn't just make the drive worse. Eventually, i ran SpinRite in "data recovery" mode.
Several days later, SpinRite said it was 0.54% done (99.46% remaining), and would take 11867 hours to finish. That's around 1 year and 4 months. SpinRite's hyped "DynaStat" feature was spending a very long time doing absolutely nothing on every single bad sector. At this rate, it would take many years to find out whether SpinRite was doing anything at all.
I gave up on SpinRite, and sent email email to them asking for my 30-day money-back guarantee. No response. There is no address or phone number on their website. Shady.
Refusing to give up, but not feeling hopeful about the capability of recovery software, i googled again and found Restorer2000.
To my great shock and surprise, this program actually worked. At first it progressed slowly, trying each bad sector 10 times, but then i found that i could tell it to check each sector only once. With that setting, it went much faster and took around an hour to scan my whole drive. It then showed me everything that was on it: the good files, the errors, the deleted files, everything. I restored some smaller files, and it just worked. I immediately bought the program ($50) and spent the next several hours merging the recoverable parts of the drive into a copy of my existing 6-month backup.
More after-the-fact research turned up online reviews such as TopTen Reviews: Data Recovery Software. However, most of the software and the reviews seem to focus on recovering accidentally deleted files from a hard drive that is operating perfectly, not on recovering data from a hard drive with errors.