HELP!! hdd died!

[boingo]

Hi im a newbie here, hope that someone can give me some help. i recently got a computer, and i've been leaving it on 24hours since march downloading stuff. problem was, i got back one day to find that my computer was making this weird screeching noise, so i decided to restart it. However it couldnt get rebooted and all my 80 gigs of data seems to have been lost

so i brought it to a pc clinic where they could identify my hdd but couldnt read it in windows explorer. they said they could do a full data recovery for me for 250 bucks, which is quite alot of money. so i searched around for programmes and chanced upon recover my files.

my qn is, do you **** noe of its possible to recover my data given my hdd crashing like that? and how to do it?

also its said that this programme can recover data from formatted hard disks, so if i do format my hdd, can it still recover data?

if any of you could reply asap, that would be great. very very depressed over the loss of my data, thanx

yours sincerely,
boingo

[GDH]

You should be able to get your data back.

However, it is difficult to say wat the problem is as strange noises are often a sign of a physical disk problem (ie. at a mechanical level).

But it the PC shop said they drive is running OK then you should be able to get all the data back yourself.

Download Recover My Files version 3.73 from http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe and install it on your good drive.

Run the program and first try a "Fast Format Recover". You will not see a drive letter, so in the hard drive selection list look for the "physical drive" that matches the size of your problem drive. Search this. A Fast Format Recover may not work in your situation, but it is worth giving a try as it only takes a few minutes to finish the search.

If it does not work, move on to a "Complete Format Recover" of the physical drive and search for the default selected files types. At the end of the search the program will rebuild your entire old partition. Using the trial version you will be able to preview the contents of files found, and if you like what you see you can then purchase a product activation key and save your files to the other drive.

Please let us know how you get on.