[Silound]

Unless the drive is making some unusual clicking or grinding noises, this is not a mechanical failure. If it IS making these kinds of noises, then your ONLY option is professional file recovery, which is hellishly expensive. Trying home-rigged methods will almost assuredly result in partial or incomplete data recovery, or even potential total data loss!

For what it's worth, in my 15 years of experience, if the data was that critically important, I would have it professionally recovered, damn the cost.

This sounds to me like a case of file structure corruption on the disk, which happens if file structure was being written to the disk when she pulled the cable. Unfortunately, removing the drive from the enclosure and plugging it directly into the computer's motherboard will not solve this problem.

The disk has a huge number of areas to store data, and keeps something akin to a chart that tells it what data is stored and where. If that "chart" is corrupted (by pulling the plug before the computer has ejected the drive, for example) then the data is incomplete and the drive cannot tell where files are stored.

There are two ways you can try to recover this if it is just a file problem:

One is to try to Ubuntu method listed above. There is about a 30-70 chance you can recover some or all files because of the difference in the way the two operating systems manage file structures on disk (Windows vs Linux).

The only other option is to use a recovery software that will try to analyze the disk and possibly recover files. Because the actual data is still there on the disk, a recovery program like CardRecovery should be able to recover some of the data.


A warning: No recovery method is 100% foolproof, and frequently they cannot return everything. If you are serious about wanting those pictures back as complete as possible, then go with professional data recovery.