As posted in many other places, the USB port on my external hard drive broke in February. Last month I took my hard drive to my local Best Buy, and the genius (not in a good way) initialized my hard drive, after I told him that I had close to 800 gigs of stuff on it (pictures, video files, music). What I would like to know is, if there is any way to recover the data from the hard drive, even if it encrypted by SmartWare?
I’m also going to see if I rearrange the broken port and sloder it back on the board, to see if it will work.
Please someone reply to my inquiry. Thank you very much.
The thing is, I want to do the data recovery myself. I don’t have the $$ to have someone else do it. Know of any data recovery software (preferably full versions available for download) that I can use to get the job done?
I had a similar problem and I used Test Disk to pull data. It was able to get the right size of data back, but they were all in weird file formats and I was never able to get them into a readable form. Mine messed up when someone did something on a Mac though, maybe you’ll have an easier time since yours was messed up on a PC. I would start there and see if it can find any files. There is a pretty good tutorial on the website. Good luck.
