How do you recover data from a failed hard drive without giving it to a company?

If you have another computer you can install it as a slave to it's drive but if it's a laptop it requires a special cord to connect it.

Or what I did with mine... I bought an external hard drive, used a Boot CD called BartPE (it loads a windows like environment and has a A4C (or something) File Manager, you can transfer files that way.

Though I recovered my files over the network (requires adding network drivers to the Boot CD) and another computer, but that's only because the xHDD i got wasn't plug and play.

Hello, I would like to make you aware that most data recovery companies do not employ the kind of staff that would sell off your data. In my company (see link below), all staff are security cleared, free from criminal records and have signed Non-Disclosure agreements to ensure that customer's data is kept confidential.

Companies that offer data recovery would not be able to survive if it was disclosed that they had exposed their client's data to any risks, particularly those that involve their own staff.

Entering into a Non-Disclosure Agreement with a company that can help is the most reliable method of recovering from this drive.

I would suggest that the problem with your hard drive is either media degradation, bad sectors, that prevent you from accessing the partitions. It could also be a file system corruption.

To find out for sure try downloading free trial data recovery software from the internet. If it turns out to be a mere file system corruption the software should be able to recover your data. If you have bad sectors the results will vary dependent on the quality of the software and the degree of the problem.

If you have a severe media degradation problem you WILL need professional help.

I would not recommend running Chkdsk, this will likely destroy your data.

My laptop has back up