StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Okay, here's the situation; my dad has a hard drive with some really important data; mainly some JPGs and some phone numbers on it.

My original plan was to hook it up to the computer via an USB to IDE cable, and then use Get Data Back to recover the data. However, we've hit a serious snag here.

Both Windows 2000 and Windows XP computers recognize the hard drive via the USB converter, but almost immediately BSOD, with a ntfs.dll error.

So what are my options for low level data recovery?

Linux liveCD?

I would hope it's not a physical defect, just some minor corruption that an alternate driver can somewhat ignore.

I agree with Pu-239 that accessing the drive from a Linux machine is your best bet. However it's possible that the problem is in the driver for the USB-IDE convertor, so you could try connecting the drive to a spare IDE connector instead of messing about with USB.

I've only seen this once, it was caused by a virus seriously trashing the root directory. Linux got things under control, though.