Lost Photos

[Aquanaut]

Desperately hoping for help. I've been told the laptop hard drive is broken. Is there anyway to retrieve my prescious family photos

 

[nflowers]

Depends on what is wrong with it - I assume whoever said it's broken has tried the usual software recovery programs, so if it's physically dead (head crash, PCB fail etc.), professional companies can extract the data but expect to pay several hundred/thousands of pounds depending on what's wrong with it.

 

[Aquanaut]

Thanks for that, I was afraid that will be the case

 

[motorbiking]

I'd be tempted to remove the drive, connect it to a cheap usb drive enclosure and plug it in to another computer. the O/S may have been trashed, preventing it from booting, but there may well be plenty of files still in good shape. It really depend how stuffed the drive is and how erased the data got while trying to fix.

worth a try for a tenner.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/25-inch-sataide-esatausb-enclosure-a49hg

and if you do get progress - go buy a portable USB drive ~ £50 for 1TB and use it to back up your photos.

 

[opps]

I too would drop it into a caddy to see if it can be read. If it can't, you may want to try to buy an identical second hand drive and use that as a donor, swapping out parts as necessary.

 

[Diyisfun]

Where you not 'cloud connected'

 

[opps]

Where you not 'cloud connected'

not everyone wants to back up images to the cloud.

I guess J Law regrets having done so

 

[jnix2]

As mentioned, try connecting it to another computer. If you can do that, give https://www.piriform.com/recuva a go - I've heard good things about it retrieving files from "broken" harddrives.

Good luck!

 

[ericmark]

As mentioned, try connecting it to another computer. If you can do that, give https://www.piriform.com/recuva a go - I've heard good things about it retrieving files from "broken" harddrives.

Good luck!

I used that and yes could get files but lost the director information, did chkdsk driveletter: /k and drive now works again. I never rely on the computers internal drive, I always back up to a USB drive, however computer drive when down and before I got it back with new drives the USB drive went, so it does not matter how much you back up there is a limit. The laptop had raid system but I ignored the warnings so still lost it all. Clearly with a mechanical fault nothing much you can do, except look for camera cards and see if pictures still on the card.