HDD beep of death (read head) how to recover?

nightmarevoid · December 15, 2016

I built a computer for a friend a while ago (the hackintosh if anyone remembers me) and during the process she gave me an old Seagate drive from another computer and asked me to install windows on it for dual boot. So I installed windows and made an exfat partition so she could trade files between her mac and windows OS partitons.

Now that old drive has the read-head beep of death, and the data isn't accessible. It does still show up as a drive, though. I feel like the right recovery software could get the data off. It's all of her artwork from the last year, and more importantly her memes. If nothing works I'll tell her to send it to a recovery company, but for now what are all of your suggestions?

Zodiark1593 · December 15, 2016

Continued operation of the drive may cause further damage to the data. TestDisk is probably the best software solution here, but for the lengthy period of time the disk will have to operate, there is a high probability of data corruption.

If the data is very important, professional data recovery tops the list of options.