How can I recover data from a hard drive that is no longer detected?
Downloaded Parted Magic (pmagic-pxe-6.6-x86-64). On opening the zip file, I could not find any .exe file but two folders, boot and pmagic. Iam not a computer techie but a normal home user so I am in a quandary as to how I should proceed. Please bear with me and request you to kindly take me through the paces. I have a licensed version of Easeus Partition Wizard but am not too sure how to use it. Also, in my initial request, I had forgotten to mention that when I connect my faulty disk as an external storage disk in the USB port, I hear a constant "tick tick" sound which I am told is a mechanical failure. Could this be the root cause of my problem and could you offer any solution? Thanking you in the meanwhile.
Do not double click to open the zip file. Zip files must be extracted, this can be done with a number of programs such as UniExtract http://www.filehippo.com/downl...
7-zip http://www.7-zip.org/
Once extracted you should have a folder,double click to open,now you should see an ISO file PartedMagic x.x.iso. You now need to burn this file as an image using a burning program such as ImgBurn, or CDburnerXP http://www.imgburn.com/
http://cdburnerxp.se/en/downlo...
This would most likely be the version of PartedMagic you would need http://sourceforge.net/project...
Once you have the disk burned, be sure your computer is configured to boot from CD and boot from it. Good luck there is a learning curve with recovery and using recovery software. Yes the ticking is a sign of mechanical failure,you may not get but a brief amount of time to attempt recovery.
You may want to reconsider Recuva or a downloaded Linux distro such as Mint-11 http://www.linuxmint.com/downl... to try to copy the most important files.See Jeffery's post below. The Mint-11 ISO would be burned as an image with the same programs mentioned above .