drive recovery programs.

I have a WD 250G drive that I am trying to recover.I dont want it to boot up I just need the documents and photos off it.
I have tried testdisk program but it took more than 17 hours and I ended up with back-up files that i couldnt even open.
I have purchased Stellar Phoenix program.This program can see my drive that I am trying to recover in the section labelled search for lost volumes,and the program can see the drive.But it does not seem to want to locate the files.

Is there any other program that I could use to recover the files on this drive.The drive is spinning,but windows cannot see it through my PC.
You can see the drive via going through administrator tools.

Any help appreiated.
NeilC

 

Yep it takes a long time to can sectors on an hdd 17hrs is quite short.photorec is pretty good as is test disc,since i don't use those progs i'm wondering why you can't open the recovered files are they housed in a container that photorec produces so you need to extract the data with perhaps a zip prog or something (will windows let you add a drive letter in admin tools if one is not already present)

running the WD hdd test tool will tell you what you need to know,tho on the face of it sounds like damaged sectors & most probably too many have made the hdd unreadable

In this situation i'd run getdataback it's free to scan but recovery will require paying a lot of money(free full version available if you know where to go *winks*),if this can't recover anything then professional recovery service is your only option left to you

 

Thanks Guys used the recuva program no problems and now all files and documents have been recovered.

Help appreciated.

Neilc