Advice Needed File Covery s/w?

[jeallen01]

Good afternoon

Today's "bad news" is that the backup USB drive that my stepdaughter used with her old laptop now appears to have "No files" on either of the partitions and so I can't retrieve some quite important files from it - last week's bad news was the old laptop itself went ***sup and I am now setting up a new one for her, and she needs those files off the USB drive to put on it.

Earlier this afternoon the USB drive appeared to be working when connected to the new laptop, and I was reorganising the files prior to copying them to that laptop - then suddenly "everything" on each partition just disappeared! I changed USB cables, swopped the drive into another USB enclosure and so-on, but nothing worked - and even using the Computer Management console showed no files on the partitions.

So, I (rather rapidly!) need to find some decent file recovery s/w for HDDs (I have s/w for SD cards, but nothing specifically for HDDs) as I haven't had this problem for some time (except for the total disaster last Oct when the HDD of my main laptop went belly up during the 1st attempt to clone it to the SSD!).

Therefore your suggestions would be most appreciated!

 

[jeallen01]

Update: the problem actually seems to be that the USB3 port on the laptop in question is F**ked - now chasing the supplier for a replacement m/c!

BTW: tried several "recovery" programmes found on the "net" - and was not that "impressed"

 

[Ghostleader]

Nightmare, at least it wasn't the drive after all though.

 

[jeallen01]

Ref that laptop, I did a bit more fault finding last night and concluded that the USB3 port is screwed - so sent a "very direct" email to the supplier (Europc in East Kilbride) and then phoned them this morning. Because I need the replacement PDQ, I've had to pay for it, with the promise of a refund when they get the existing one back next week (OTOH, I've chosen a m/c that has an Icore-3 CPU instead of a Pentium, even though it has a smaller disk and 4GB RAM instead of 8GB, because I think that should be a bit faster all round).