Diagnostics for Hard Drives and Data Recovery at Phreaknic13 Part 1 of 9

[enilegnave21]

If it was a virus that wiped my HDD, is there software available to recover my data? I don't think I'm having HDD problems, no bad sounds or smells, but, IMHO, seems to be the result of a wipe disk (a reformat?) I was awaiting receipt of a IDE adapter to hardwire a 3.5 HDD as an external device to backup everything; the problem happened while my adapter cable was enroute from ebay ;-( I hope you can give me some inexpensive/free suggestions.

Thanks so much for all the great info.

[enilegnave21]

While watching a movie online on my Dell Latitude x200 laptop, the next thing I knew my Windows xp, sp 2, running on a 30G IBM HDD model # IC25N030ATCS04-0 suddenly stopped. On reboot I got an HD error msg, then HD failure msgs. Got a new HD, loaded Ubuntu 9.04, slaved my original HDD and get 0 info on a 0 G HDD. What can I do next to attempt to recover my data, esp. photos/vid of the trip road trip with my brother who just died in December. HELP please!!!

[CouncilHater2009]

i can you tell me what i would need to start Recovering Data from any harddrive like what sort of tools IDE & SATA 2.5 or 2.5