Hard Drive problems.

kathos

So my drive is dead. I think.

When it's connected to the computer it refuses to boot up at all, so I have to disconnect it for my computer to work.

So I have to unplug it completely for my computer to boot at all. I wouldn't mind it so much though, but I have pictures that I've been taking that are on that drive.

Any comprehensive tools I can use for data recovery?

snarks

First thing that came to my mind was the ol' "Stick the Hard Drive in the Freezer for 24 Hours" trick: Stick it in a ziplock bag, freeze it for 24 hours, re-attach it, and you may be able to keep the drive alive long enough to copy the data from the one drive to another.
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

The blog above also recommends this software for recovering files, but I've never tried it:
(http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1 )

Unfortunately, if you'd rather not try that trick or neither of the solutions above work for you, since this sounds very much like a dying hardware problem, I don't think there's any consumer level software you can use to recover any of the data. If the data's very important to you, you could ship your hard drive off to specialists who can usually scrub some data off the drive, but it can get pretty pricey.

Silvoculous

kathos wrote: »

So I have to unplug it completely for my computer to boot at all. I wouldn't mind it so much though, but I have pictures that I've been taking that are on that drive.

Plug it in as a slave (assuming you have another drive that you could use as a master) and recover the data using Drive Rescue or some similar program.