Recovering my clients hard drive

[ManIFesT]

Hello,

I'm new here so I thought I would start everyone off with a good hard drive recovering question.

I have a client I am doing publishing/web site work for whos hard drive crashed this morning. He was loading pictures off of his digital camera when the computer restarted. It posted and tried to boot of the hard drive but it couldn't find any data on it. In bios it shows the hard drive as being there. I loaded the hard drive into my computer and checked that it was still being read in windows. It showed the drive as there but it was showing 0bytes of available space. Everything was 0 for that matter.

This leads me to believe there is either a problem with the circuit board or the platters. I don't see how the platters could get totally deleted though, that's why I think it will be possible to recover his data. I have thought about throwing it in the freezer for 24 hours to see if it's a mechanical error but I don't want to try that until I am sure I can't do it another way.

I don't have an extra hard drive of the same brand/model so I can't try changing the circuit board either. Should I tell him to contact the manufacturer and ask for a replacement drive if his waranty is still valid? The hard drive is a WD if it matters, I don't have the model number currently but I can get it if needed.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

[glc]

Try Ontrack Easy Recovery to see if it can see any files. The trial version will show you what it can recover, then you buy it to do the actual recovery.

[ManIFesT]

I'll give it a try. Atleast I don't have to buy it to find out if it is possible. That's always good .

Thanks glc.

[Chevelle88]

Try GetDataBack for NTFS or Fat, great program that helped me in the past,

http://www.runtime.org/

They do have a demo so that you could check if it works before you buy

Chevelle,