Help me! Hard drives!!

[Phemar]

My portable hard drive crashed two days ago. Everything was on there --  my whole life. Everything I've done in the past 7 years was on there... My AGS games and source code, the songs I've written, all my 50 gigs of music, all my irreplaceable photos, pictures I've drawn, stories I've written...

Does anyone know if there's anything I could possibly do to retrieve this information without going to the extremes of spending thousands of bucks to have some scientist sift through my disks?

Any help would be appreciated.

(btw, it's the hard disk that stopped working, the USB interface on the portable is fine.)

Again, thanks a lot for any help.

[nulluser]

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[Gamer_V]

Most importantly, don't use the disk for anything else if you don't want to overwrite the old data! Data mostly isn't deleted, only the information on the location of the data, the fat or whatchacallit. If the pc can detect it, and give the drive a letter, chances are you'll be able to recover it using a program like active undelete, partition magic, r-tt or whatever. They don't exist for free, but if it's your entire life I guess you don't care for a little torrenting. Those programs are most of the time able to find your old files - I've been able to recover files from 2 formatted hard drives.

[BOYD1981]

is it an actual external drive or just an external enclosure with a normal IDE/SATA drive in it?
if it's a normal drive you could, but i'm not expert at this, try running chkdsk although i'm really not sure if it would help.

[Akatosh]

I'd not advise you to use chkdsk. It can really, really mess up you data.

[Phemar]

Gamer_V: The drive hasn't been formatted, it just stopped working. The computer doesn't pick it up or assign a letter.

Boyd: It's a external enclosure with a normal hard disk inside it. The enclosure still works, it's just the disk that's broken.

[Barbarian]

You could try it on a different computer as well. Maybe it's just your computer having trouble reading it?

But sometimes when a hard-drive fails, it can be very difficult to salvage anything from it.  I know it's a hard lesson to learn to keep important data/ files on more than one souce.

[monkey0506]

Which is why you're supposed to hyper-compress all your important files and email them to yourself, splitting the archives across Gmail accounts as necessary.