Hard Drive Recovery

If there's one place with experience dealing with recovering data from crashed hard drives, it's GFF.

The hard drive for the research lab computer at school recently failed, and it had a ton of important data and experiments on it that my professor hadn't backed up. I never saw it, but he says it brought up a message about corrupted system files when he tried to boot it up. Rather than trying to fix it he just called IT, and they obviously made no attempt to recover data. All we got back was a note saying that the HDD had been "re-imaged."

So, is there any way to get at least some of this stuff back? I've seen programs for this sort of thing tossed around in the past, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

So I advice to pester IT until you get a fresh drive. Write down the drive serial and don't stop bothering them until you get a different one. I find it very irresponsible that possibly broken hardware is just "zeroed" and returned back to the person which turned it in - especially since it's a harddrive and data is valuable...

That was our thought too, but the professor doesn't want to piss off the IT guys since he's currently on good terms with them and they're pretty tempermental. They just flat out refused to do things for the last professor I worked with, so I can see why he's worried about that.

There's nowhere I can't reach.