Can I Salvage Data from my Corrupted SATA drive?

[brvheart]

My data drive started giving me problems today. It has been working fine, but today my machine froze, and I rebooted to find my second (data) SATA HD missing in My Computer. After a little tweaking, I got the drive to show up again, but it shows corrupt, and data is not accessable. This is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 250g HD.

This is rather important, as I have ALL my audio sessions and samples on this drive. I don't have the data backed up to another drive or DVD's; I know, very foolish. I've just never had a drive give me problems before.

Anyways, I have tried new SATA cables, and tried a different SATA port on the mobo. The HD's are standard IDE configuration. The system drive is in port SATA1 - Master and the data drive is in SATA3 - Slave. When I let the system disk check run during startup, it quickly flashes "Corrupt Master File Table" then goes on to the normal Windows Desktop. When I go to the drives properties, it shows the drive with 0% free or available space. From properties I cannot run error checking OR defrag. When I attempt defrag it says "Disk Defragmenter cannot run on this volume type".

I don't mind so much that the drive went bad, but I DO mind the idea of losing all of my data. This is a recording computer only, and is only used for that purpose. The question I would like to ask here, is what can I do to try to access the data on the drive? I don't know much about retreiving the data, so any help would be appreciated. My other computers don't support SATA, but I DO have an external drive I could connect to the computer to transfer data to if I can access it.

Thanks!

[glc]

Your best shot is spend $89 for Spinrite if the corruption is due to bad sectors. Have you run SeaTools diagnostics on the drive yet?

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

You may have to follow that up with data recovery software. This can get quite expensive and there are quite a few different packages out there, some of which work better than others in certain circumstances. Most commercial packages do offer a free demo which will tell you what it CAN recover if you buy it. A professional recovery service will cost you $1000+.

The only free data recovery software I've used is PC Inspector. It may work. The best regarded pay packages are GetDataBack and Ontrack Easy Recovery.

[tempus]

you might try a program called "test disk". it can rebuild corrupted partition tables and is free to download. just do a google search for it.

[Panama Red]

Tempus, no need to quote an entire post before you answer.

[warcloud3]

You can also remove the hardrive from the pc and install it in another pc as a slave, if its the operating system thats the problem you will still be able to get the data and files from the drive.

not sure if this will work in your situation, but it has worked for me. I also record my own music and store it on my raid 0 setup.

[brvheart]

As I mentioned earlier, my other computers dont support SATA..

Anyways, I'm sorry I haven't replied sooner, I've been very busy. I got the data back using GetDataBack. Works great. I tried all of the free ones I could find, and they didn't work at all. Getdataback was very easy to use, unlike most of the others.

Thank you very much for the replies!