Frequently Asked Questions

Physical damage
My drive is making funny noises, and try as I might I can't seem to access it in any mode. What can I do?

One cause of data loss is physical damage to a hard drive. If your drive starts to make funny noises, you should be wary that it might be a symptom of the drive starting to fail.
Recovering data from a physically damaged drive is prohibitively expensive, so you should immediately test your drive using a free download from here - the program in question is Data Advisor Free Edition, and can be installed to floppy disk. Obviously you'll need to download and install this on a working machine.
   If you’ve downloaded and installed the trial version of EasyRecovery Professional, you can access Data Advisor through the Disk Diagnostics section of that program.
   You then boot from this disk, and it’ll test your drive for physical damage. If it finds any, stop using the drive immediately. If the drive is still working, invest in a replacement, and then immediately transfer all your data across; if it’s not working, prepare yourself for a big hefty bill (do a Google search for "data recovery" to find local professionals), and don’t use the drive again or else you’ll risk more damage.

Can't find my drive!
I've tried searching for my drive using PC Inspector File Recovery, but nothing's detected. What can I do?

Before giving up on the free solution, follow steps eight and nine of the walkthrough here again, but this time position the lower slider at the end of the drive, so the entire disk is searched. This gives you the maximum chance of locating the missing drive information.

Partition restoration
I can't seem to access certain folders from a missing drive using PC Inspector File Recovery. What gives?

Unfortunately there are limits to any data-recovery program. If your data is stored on a NTFS-formatted drive in an encrypted or protected folder like the Documents and Settings folder, you'll be unable to access this folder or any of the files within it using PC Inspector File Recovery. You can access this data using other data-recovery software - including Ontrack's EasyRecovery Professional (see here), but you may wish to try a different technique: namely, restore the drive's Master Boot Record or other partition information. One such tool is Partition Table Doctor from here - it costs US$39, but the demo lets you find out if your partition can be restored or not.