The hard disk is dead!

Hard disks are surprisingly reliable. If you think about the technology – the head floats on a cushion of air thinner than a speck of dust, or even a fingerprint – it’s remarkable they work at all. And they keep working for ages… but not for ever. As with all man-made things, especially ones that have complicated moving bits, one day they stop working.

My daughter presented me with an external (USB) hard disk drive that wouldn’t be read by the computer today; the disk was spinning and it’s data light flickering, but Windows Vista didn’t like the drive at all and insisted there was nothing on it and would I like to format it now?

I’d rather not – its full of her photos from the past year.

I tried all the obvious things, and some non-obvious ones. I tried three different third-party utilities designed to fix HDD problems, but to no avail. Then I came across File Scavenger from Que Tek Consulting: http://www.quetek.com

Their free demo (restricted to previews of files only) proved that it could see the contents of the disk, so £38 and half an hour later and we have recovered every single photo off the disk.

You may have your own favourite utility, and I’m not saying this is the only way of fixing the problem, but everything I tried until I found Que Tek’s product failed to work whereas their File Scavenger did ‘exactly what it says on the tin’.

I was impressed, so I thought I’d pass on the link: http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm