i have a segate external hard drive that died and i was wondering what kind of software you would recommend i use to recover or attempt to recover my data. and how you would go upon recovering the data.
If its external first try to remove it from its cage to see if the drive is fine but the interface has shat itself, just plug it into any sata port on your mobo, add power and cross your fingers
How big is it, and how far are you willing to go? You could go all out and image the entire drive and then just look in the unallocated space. Or you could use a software called Recuva. Recuva is nice. The question is are you able to see the hard drive when you plug it in.
like Vandal85 says, bypass the enclosure's interface (if any)
Alltjough there is no alleged crime spoken of, some of the software used in the field of digital forensics may help to obtain data that is thought to be lost or unrecoverable. I am not very familiar with these programs, but there are many Linux distros devoted to digital forenbsics as well as individual programs for windows as well.
I use this daily. Normally for data recovery I throw it into a Debian linux VM and have ddrescue do its thing. Which takes hours, especially if its the OS volume. Ddrescue has an Ubuntu project as well, called gddresuce. They're both the same.
If encryption was used on the drive, especially bitlocker, you're pretty much screwed.
We haven't heard from him so I will asume he died :3. I'm going to guess its a 2TB hard drive, You run Recuva against it you will probably get most of it. But its going to take a long time. Long is an understatement, it really depends on your processing power.
If you can see the hard drive from your system you are golden. BUT if its dead physically... You're pretty much fucked unless you want to spend a pretty, pretty penny on physical drive recovery services.
This right here. Unless the drive is clicking, it's not dead and you can typically recover the data from it.