Recovering documents and e-mail from crashed or damaged hard drive

What  is the best way of recovering Word, Excel, PDF Documents and messages in e-mail folders from a crashed or damaged hard  drive?  Is there any free software available that can specifically do this

You don't say what OS, or what client you used, or if it was webmail or direct from your PC, , but ultimately it depends if the drive can be accessed, But lets try the simple thing first, go online to your host, and log into your webmail, with luck they will save a copy on the server, and you will be able to download from there what you need.

 

So try this first, if it hasn't save the mail on the server then let us know, give us the missing details I mentioned, and also mention if you are able to add the drive as a "slave" on another working system, then we can go from there.

Thanks. I need to recover some Word, Excel and PDF
documents as well as several e-mail messages from
two old desktop computers. One is a Pentium 1 running
Windows 98 and the other is a Pentium 4 running
Windows XP. On both, the e-mail client is Outlook
Express 6 and the hard drives on both the machines have crashed and got damaged beyond repair.

Windows cannot even recognize the drives or be started
with a boot disk. I have tried putting each hard
drive as a slave on another machine but to no avail.

A local technician advises that I need to send the
drives to a data recovery service but that can be
very expensive. Any suggestion as regards the best
course of action would be appreciated.

Well if the drives can't be read then that's it I'm afraid, the only option is data recovery, and it is expensive, as they strip the drive down recover what they can in a very clean environment, which is not that fast, and is very specialised, hence the cost, and even then there is no guarantee it will work, I have a 1TB Seagate drive, the one that had the bad firmware, and died if you didn't update it before it died.

 

Well mine died as I knew nothing of the issue until to late, but as it was their fault they paid for the data recovery, my estimate is they got maybe 90% to 95% of my data back, but all my text files were useless, they were unusable as they were so scrambled, physical files such as mp3's etc were fine though, but text files, I don't remember if a single file was useable.

 

Have you checked your web mail ?

There is a possibility the email's are still on the server, if they are you can get your files from the webmail interface easily, but although Windows may not be able to read the drives, Linux "may" be able to, the only thing to try other than the server is to see if Slacko (Puppy) Linux can see the drives, download and burn the iso to a disk, then boot to that disk, and see if you can see\access the problem drives, if you can then you may get lucky.

 

You can get the slacko-5.6-PAE.iso Here (direct download link), it runs in your systems ram, so it does not touch or change your hard drives, not unless you alter any of drives files that are essential, but in essence you can copy files over between folders on the different drive, just navigate to them the same as you would normally, the main difference is it only takes a single click to open files\folders, just mount the drives (shown above what we know as the Start button) and navigate through them, I suggest saving them to the desktop folder under your OS Drive - Users - Username - Desktop, then when you reboot to Windows, they should be there ready and waiting.

 

Now if your files are in your emails, assuming the drive can be seen and accessed by Slacko, you will need to navigate to C:\Users

- Username - AppData - Local - Microsoft - Outlook, the file(s) you need are the pst ones, Here is a bit of info about the file types, but I do suggest only using Copy and paste, that way worst case you still have the originals, then when you're back in windows, launch Outlook.and import the files, all being well you will have what you need, but if Linux can't see\access the drive(s) then that's pretty much it, hope this helps, fingers crossed for you.