A very distraught and gutted producer :(

hi guys, im appealing for ANYONE that can help me, im sooo upset, as u all know im a music producer, ive had several websites in the past, and i share alot of acapellas/stems as soon as i gain them, but recently,, my hard drive went kaput, and i have lost 15 yrs of all my prouduction stuff ( yes i know, i shouldve backed it up ) im also an it engineer, and ive tried many recovery programs, i get them all back, but all are corrupt, is there ANY help any1 can give me, or is there a way to look up on my past credits on here to help me get at least a small percentage back without maxin out my credits again?? theres gotta be something i can do,, the only thing i can think of is spend days on here lookin at the whole list in all threads and look for myt lil icon that says ive posted, ideally i wanna get me hard drive back with all my stuff, any1 had any joy?? im literally beggin ppl here,,

This happened to my hard drive 2 1/2 years ago, and I still have yet to recover it.

DriveSavers is a company who has a 99% success rate at saving drives. They make a duplicate copy of the hard drive and copy it to another. The cost can run up to $3,500 depending on the size of the drive and delivery time. They have a variety of options. Check them out.

Good luck to you. I know this feeling and it sucks!

Best I could come up with:
http://literecords.com/search.php?searchid=870671

No consolation but you're not the only one. I've had two major hard drive failures in the last five years. Fact is hard drives fail, it could be three years from now, it could be tomorrow. IT STILL SUCKS!
There is hope depending on how bad the platters are damaged.
They're the key to everything if they're badly damaged ie: scratched from bad heads etc the less chance of recovering your data no matter what method. The most common, is dropping or bumping the drive while the head is on the platter. If the drive just stopped working one day it could be the pcb board, and if you can find the same one you can sometimes swap them out depending on brand and firmware.
What were the symptoms leading up to the failure? If there's still some functioning heads you can use Linux command line software like DDRescue. I'm just going to assume you used some kind of recovery software and you got back files that won't open right? This happened to me the first time. I spent 850 Euros at a local computer repair shop, and they just used Linux apps to slowly clone the drive data while the heads were failing. I got about 60% usable files back, many are cut off or fragmented, the rest were corrupt. They would show the correct size etc but would not open. This is because data for one mp3/wav is not stored sequentially, it's all over the platters depending on what filesystem is used. Mine was Mac OSX Snow Leopard.

As far as full recovery, the big companies like Drivesavers will say work has to be done in a class 5 clean room, and if you open a drive anywhere else poof all your data will be ruined and that's complete bullshit!
It's true you don't want any dust or other contaminants on the platters, but you just have to use some common sense if you decide to open your drive and take a quick peek if you don't want to go to the pros yet.
The arm will likely be parked on the platter somewhere. If you see little tiny loose magnetic bits the heads came off the arm, and you will need a head assembly swap.
I'd need more detailed info on the drive model specs and what happened when it failed to help you further amigo. Been there done that.

Good luck :)

hello mate,, thanx sooo much for the reply, and all the info, unfortunately it was more my error than the drive failing, im a pc engineer anyway, and i stupidly formatted the drive ( thinking it was another drive of the same size ), normally this does not bother me, as i can usually get them back as i do it regul;ar for ppl that have had hard disk failures anyway,, but,,, what i VERY STUPIDLY did, was start backin up a vst set up folder from my downloads ( on c drive ) and although the folder was only about 340mb of vst set ups, the fact is, its obviously already changed the way the file system works on the d drive,,,, ( my drive i accidentally formatted by mistake ) so i ran my usual recovery program, (hetman partition recovery ) its recovering all the drive, with folder structures, its all there, i can see all the files folders, sizes, etc etc, but the odd files that it will let me play are all mangled sounds,, and the other 95% are just saying unknown format, or unable to pl;ay this file, whatever software i use it wont open,, all of my samples will not play,, i would purely love any help or advice info to which i can solve this prob, as u know,, its devastating, its not just years of music ive lost, a tremendous acapella library, a huge huge stems folder, but also, some sentimental songs that i did for mums passing, and other sentimentals, thank you so much for ur input, would love to hear from you again if theres any way u can help,,,

Yeah man hate to tell you but the moment you added new things to the wiped drive they took spots that previously held your data, that previous data is gone and that's why you get the fragmented files. The filesystem sees it, but can't gather all the parts.
You're just going to have to cull through and make a list of what was most important and track it all down again. You can try consulting a forensic data specialist to see if there's any other options. They lurk on some of the reddit tech pages.
https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/