Trying to recover data from a hard drive

[littlepigboy5]

My Friend's hard drive "stopped working", so he sent it to me to try and recover his data.  it didn't have windows on it, it was an extra drive for games, docs, etc., but it was being used with a windows machine.  I plugged it into my PC, i could hear and feel the drive spinning.  when i typed in my password i was greeted with a black screen for about 30 seconds, but then windows booted and has been acting normally.  I see the Drive in my file explorer, but when I double click on it I get the following error "Location is not available.  E:\ is not accessible.  The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".  Any ideas?  I obviously don't have the tools at hand to do any professional level data recovery, but I thought it might be something easy, especially since the drive is powering on and I can see the partitions in Windows Disk Management.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

If your friend's data is important to him, quit mucking around with it and advise him to seek professional drive data recovery. It can easily run into several thousands of dollars with no guarantee of success but the pros are far more likely to have success than you will. DIY attempts (or even just powering it up) are far more likely to wind up destroying data that a pro might have been able to recover.

 

Only if your friend decides the data is not worth the cost of professional recovery or simply can't afford it should you attempt to do it yourself. Good luck to both of you!