hard drive recovery...
 

Anyone know any good free programs I can use to try and recover data off a fooked hard drive?

I got back from my honeymoon and the hard drive went on my main PC. I wouldn't be bothered but it had a lot of music on there and the wife's coursework :?

I've tried putting the drive in this PC, it scans it then tells me there are a lot of errors then won't load windows so I'm at a loss as to what to do next apart from trying a recovery program...

Put the drive in as a second drive, set the jumper setting to slave (this is near the cable that plugs into the drive) then, once in windows, try and access it. If it's making a clicking noise then it's fucked, if it doesn't detect, then it's fucked.

agree with this. the jumper is a little plastic clip at the back of the drive about the size of an icon in your system tray (very very small). try doing a disk check on it whilst it being a secondary drive. go into command prompt and type chkdsk x: (replace the x with the drive letter on your hard drive, typically c, d or e)

I've put it in as a secondary drive but I've got the jumper on cable select

It detects it, does a disc check and comes up with a load of bad sectors then won't load windows...

As said above try slaving the drive to a "Working operating system to access it but..... If the Partition is damaged it won't access it.
When mine went down completely, (Drive would still spin though) I got a Program called Active UN-Delete, let it scan my bad drive all night on a Deep scan, and i recovered everything:)