Any suggestions for recovering from a hard drive issue?

[forgop]

Long story short: Drive in laptop was knocked on the floor and wouldn't reboot (no surprise). When I first put it in the USB enclosure, I was able to read off of the 2 partitions (one was a primary, the second was the recovery as it was set up by Dell in Windows 7).

Now, I'm not having any luck pulling anything up as it seems to or not respond saying there is an I/O device error when I boot up my desktop with it connected. When I've put it in my laptop (new hard drive w/ fresh Win 7 trying to recognize from external usb), it seems to only recognize the recovery drive.

Just for grins, I plugged it in to my Macbook and it seems to be pulling up all of my data.

What would be the easiest way to get from this drive to my new laptop drive? Thanks!

[Domer]

do you have an extra external? if your mac can read and copy the data you can transfer the data to the mac and then the working external and put it on the windows machine. I don't know much about computers, but this jumped out at me as an option.

best of luck.

[forgop]

Something else I'm toying with is the bluetooth feature, but the Mac I'm trying to send from is saying that it doesn't have the correct services or something, even though I've paired both of them.

[TideRoll]

I'd say the drive is either physically damaged or not. It's interesting that you can read one partition but not another.

There is more than one FAT, and I suppose it might be possible that the regular FAT was corrupted on the partition you can't read in Windows. There are a number of recovery tools you might think of using. Some are free. There are also some Windows Pre-Installation Environment bootable CDs/DVDs which have some recovery tools integrated, some free, some bootleg, some downloadable. Think of these as bootable bare-bones Windows OS DVDs that give you a graphical interface and a limited number of programs to help you recover your data.

If it has significant actual physical damage to the platters, your prospects without some real fancy help are unfortunately limited. If you have merely scrambled your FAT, you might be in luck.

Or, you could borrow an external drive from a PC friend and plug it into the Mac and copy what you can to it, then plug it into whatever computer you are moving to. Sometimes, it might look like you have more data than you actually do. Recently, I had a disk go down and it looked like I could recover more than I actually could: I started running into a lot of read errors while recovering files to another drive.

Get back with me if you need some suggestions about bootable DVD recovery tools. The external drive from a PC would seem to me to be the most direct way of at least getting what important files that are left off of that drive. bama.tim (at) gmail.com