atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Computers & Programming Computers, Software, Accessories Hard Drive Failure

I looked at the spinrite and just didnt see that it would do to job. The free demo of the Steller software was proof thst there software would atleast get my word and excel doc back. Now if I can recover outlook express. I had multi email addresses on the machine all with there own address books but I can find the address books or all of the old emails.

The one thing that gets me the most is how is this software able to see the drive and the contence. But windows doesnt even show that the drive is even installed. I go to my computer and all I see is drive a: and C: doesnt show the old drive installed as a slave.

As far as email addresses go, give Plaxo.com a look. they keep a backup of your contact list on their servers, I can then open Outlook on a different computer and download my entire contact list onto other computers. Has other pluses as well.

Also, if you use Outlook instead of Outlook express, you can do regular backups by downloading a plugin from microsoft. The file name is usually outlook.pst. I make a copy of this about once a week.

As far as windows seeing the drive, you can probably right click My computer, select Manage, and then disk management. The drive will show up there. Since the drive is corrupted, windows may view it as an unreadable drive and hence not display it in the Windows Explorer folder.

I recently had a similar issue.

The motherboard on my CPU went bad and I thought I'd just slave the hard drive; however, I was told "it's not that simple" because the HD had a password protected profile.

So, I was sucked into paying $200 to have the data decrypted and then I had them put the HD into an external case so I could simply use via USB on a new CPU.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to verify what I was being told or to bargain shop as I was in the middle of a big project and needed the data sooner than later.