Hard Drive Recover suggestions

A little Background.
Dell Inspiron 1721 about a year old.
Windows Vista
Seagate 250gig Hard Drive.

My Laptop was sitting on the Coffee Table and I dosed off on the couch for about 20 minutes.
When I woke up the screen was black so I figured it went to sleep.
After trying several things to wake it up I held down the power button untill it powered off and then powered it back up. After post the computer could not find the boot drive.

So, I purchased a new drive and Windows7 and did a clean install.

After install I plugged the old drive in with a SATA to USB adapter.

This is what I see.

 

My question is, what tests can I run to try and recover this partition.

 

Thanks, Pete. I didn't think about using RAW in my search.
I downloaded one of the recovery tools and it just stalled out every time so I guess it's hosed.

 

Get the Seatools utilities from Seagate. Only a slight possibility, but you should find an option to backup the MBR, then renew/update the MBR. The utilities might not work with the drive on a USB adapter, so you might need to make a boot CD and put the drive back in the laptop.

 

If you want to recover what is on that partition, try Active@File Recovery. They have a trial version that should show if the data can be recovered. I have used this on a failing drive and it worked perfectly. Well worth the price.

Mike

 

Thank you Mike. Looks like that one is making progress.

I already bought it.

 

You're welcome. Keep us updated.

 

No luck. HD is junk.
Thanks anyway.

 

Too bad about the hard drive.

 

I have been doing this for a long time and I have never seen one go from fine to junk in 15 minutes with no warning! It's even still quiet so it didn't crash.

Glad I had a backup.
Unfortunately that backup doesn't include purchased software that went out the window.