AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

What a day. In front of me was a computer that was booting to nowhere. It was just a continual loop back to the statement that there were not boot files available. Then, as I got closer, I heard the tell-tale clicking of the hard drive. The good news was that it was still spinning. The bad news was that there were some critically important files on the drive that hadn’t been backed up (no, it wasn’t my drive). Option #1 – call in a data recovery company to recover the data, at a cost of about $1000. Option #2, plug it into an external enclosure and hope. The first couple of computers I plugged the drive into didn’t see it at all. Not looking good. Finally found one that recognized the drive. Looking better. Looked at the properties of the drive. 120 GB drive, 120 GB available. Really not looking good.

Enter Recuva. Recuva is software from the same company that puts out ccleaner, one of my favorite clean-up programs. So, I downloaded Recuva and ran it against the drive. Well, lo and behold, after a couple of hours, I was able to recover the critical files. Not all files were recoverable, but it did a great job, was easy to use, and did I mention that it is free? Some the features of Recua:

Undelete files on your computer

Filed under: PC Maintenance, PC Tips and Tools, Uncategorized |