Way OT, Recovering DVD recorder hard drive data

bw wrote on 10/8/2007, 5:34 PM

Sorry about OT but have great respect for wealth of knowledge here.
Daughter copies assesment DVDs for a clinic for cerebral palsy kids and the stand alone hard drive/burner has died with important stuff on the HD.
My computer recognises the drive(80 gig Samsung) in 'disk manager' but not 'my computer'.
Is there a way to read the drive? manager asks to 'initialise' I assume this will effectively prevent any recovery???
TIA, Brian

Comments

4eyes wrote on 10/8/2007, 8:13 PM

Usually the more you fiddle with the drive the farther the possibility of recovery. Especially if you scandisk the drive & have scandisk repair any errors.

Search the web for data recovery companies, you can send your drive to them if the data on it is that important. Provided you haven't make it un-repairable yet.

bw wrote on 10/9/2007, 1:45 AM

Thanks for the reply and johnmeyers email, much apreciated.
I dont think the drive is faulty just that the recorder is dead (nil out from the power supply. I think the file format on these drives must be foreign to Windows. I dont know if the same fat and format is used on all these machine types (hard drive/dvd recorders.)

4eyes wrote on 10/9/2007, 5:56 AM

Most of those boxes are running customized linux kernels.