Wife had an external WD hard drive on her Vista laptop. Then she dropped the drive and now cannot read it.
I found the USB connector on the drive interface broken off, so I removed the interface & plugged the drive into the controller for my external drive on my Windows 7 laptop.
My Disk Manglement app shows the drive is there but space is unallocated.
I already checked into a data recovery service, and the data on her drive while valuable to her (family pix), is NOT worth the outrageous $850-1700 I was quoted.
Is there a way for ME to recover this, using either her laptop or mine? If I initialize the drive will all the data ba lost? A long time ago I had a similar issue with a different drive and by luck found that by re-applying the partition data (I think I used a utility called FDISK), I was able to recover all the data. Does such a utility exist in Win7 or Vista?
