File Recovery Software

[Ziggy Stardust]

Earlier this morning, I was cleaning out my external hard drive. I just bought a new terabyte hard drive, and before I started transferring files I went through the old one to delete stuff I don't need/want anymore. The old one is a crappy WD My Book 250gig one that has given me all sorts of problems with freezing and just generally being a piece of shit piece of machinery (it doesn't even let me copy or cut files from it ... I have to open files individually and use the "Save As" mechanism in order to move them). Since I have ~220 gigs of stuff on there, it has been a real pain in the ass to get this transfer done. In any case, this morning I accidentally deleted a folder that I wanted. When I was trying to move it out of the Recycle Bin, Windows Explorer froze up (because Vista is almost as big a piece of shit as the My Book ... I don't know why I haven't upgraded to 7 yet). Anyway, once Windows Explorer rebooted, the file I was trying to move was completely deleted from both the computer and the external hard drive.

I have tried several free file recovery programs, but none of them work. Two of them didn't even let me scan the Recycle Bin, and one of them let me scan for the files, but not recover them (for some bizarre reason). Anyway, does anybody know a good program I can use to recover those files? Free would be nice, but I don't mind paying, as long as I know the program works.

Also, has anyone else had a WD My Book external hard drive? Why are they just gigantic pieces of shit? I did a quick internet search and apparently they are notorious for freezing up and being uncooperative.

[Edi]

One guy I attended a professional education course with said he had had remarkable success recovering files by putting the offending hard drive into a freezer inside a plastic bag for two to three hours.

The reason behind this is that heat increases signal loss and other undesirable side effects in electrical systems, so starting the HD up when it's got a very low temperature reduces those problems.

Obviously you'll be trying that at your own risk if you do try it.

[Lief]

Not sure I would recommend the anecdotal evidence of freezing your HDD

Have you tried connecting your external HDD to a different PC? There could just be a gremlin between your pc and it preventing it from working properly (more likely a software gremlin), try a pc with a different OS.

As to recovery programs, sorry I cannot help you any more than you can help yourself, in the past if I have had this type of problem (ie, non recoverable data), the data in question was either backed up if it was important, or simply not important, so I have never bothered looking into this!

[Darth Nostril]

One guy I attended a professional education course with said he had had remarkable success recovering files by putting the offending hard drive into a freezer inside a plastic bag for two to three hours.

The reason behind this is that heat increases signal loss and other undesirable side effects in electrical systems, so starting the HD up when it's got a very low temperature reduces those problems.

Obviously you'll be trying that at your own risk if you do try it.

I have actually tried this with a drive that unexpectedly borked on me, I managed to successfully retrieve about 90% of the files before it died for good.

[Edi]

Not sure I would recommend the anecdotal evidence of freezing your HDD

Forgot to mention that this guy had not done it with just one HD, but regularly with various internal and external HDs when otehr means failed to work.