Does Data Recovery Wizard work?

If your drive is making any noises that are abnormal, there is the chance that you *can* ruin your drive. If you have crashed heads, you can actually end up scraping the data off of your platters and data recovery would be impossible for anyone to perform.

Go to www.prosofteng.com and you can download a demo version of Data Rescue 3 for either Mac or PC. If the scan on the demo version can complete with no errors, then you should be able to recover your drive on your own. If it runs into errors, or takes an inordinate amount of time to complete a scan, then you have some sort of physical problem with the drive and should contact a data recovery service, or stop using the drive until you can afford to do so.

Feel free to give us, The Data Rescue Center, a call if you have any questions - 877-501-4949. Even if we don't do a recovery for you, we can answer some questions that might help you decide what the best option is for your scenario.

There are a lot of reasons why a drive "crashes". Some are physical failures of components in the hard drive in which case the data may be fine, but that particular drive cannot physically read the data that is intact on the internal storage medium.

Other times the physical drive components are working fine but the data encoding onto the storage medium of the drive is corrupted, damaged, destroyed and while the physical components are working, they can't read the data as it is not in readable format or recognizable form to the computer.

Regarding losing your data if you try to recover it the answer is you can do a lot of damage if you dont know what you are doing, but, if you dont have the money to hire a person who is trained on recover and restoration, then what do you have to lose? If you think you will have the money to pay a professional in a few months and you dont need the data until later, take the drive and save it as is until you have the money to hire a pro. Put a new drive in the computer, reload your application programs and away you go. If you cant wait and need your data now (you dont have it anyway if you cant read the drive) then you may have to risk further damage by trying to do it yourself. Only you can make that decision.

I would support one of the other comments that Data Rescue 3 is a good product to try. I have used it many times and have had good results with the product. The program usually runs around $100.00 USD and is pretty simple to use (read and follow the instructions).

If you have an electro-mechanical failure -- an actual crash -- no software is going to fix it. You either have to use the services of a professional data recovery firm or accept the loss. The choice depends on how valuable the lost data is, or the financial loss you will experience from having lost it.