Sam,
I manage data infrastructure for living. Here is what I would do in this situation:
1. Buy a bigger hard disk ASAP
2. Take current HDD to some data recovery shop with good feedback.
3. Ask them to give you a DD Image of COMPLETE HDD on the new HDD you have bought. -- this is most important -- it will ensure that you will not loose any more data then you already have. And it does NOT matter if it is FAT / NTFS / HFS+ (Mac file system) DD is a blind copy of the whole disk.
4. Ask them to recover data from this DD image.
That will ensure that current HDD will not deteriorate further since data will be read only once.
Its fairly straightforward to mount the DD image in a different PC and extract data from it. DD Image will have HFS+ partitions and data can be recovered from it. In case of photographs, you might loose certain areas but chances of recovering are pretty good as long as images are not stored in ZIP or some other archive.
I can do that for you free of cost if data recovery shop has done step #1 to #3.
Hope that helps. |