Did you run the quick (10 minute) or the extended (90+ minute) test?

If the former, you should run the latter. It sounds like the drive has bad sectors.

I ran the quick. I'll do the other. Thanks!

Same results - all hard drive tests passed. Any other thoughts?

Tried that. That's where the drive is not explorable and it reports that of its 20GB, 18.5 is free. End of the road? I did have a similar case recently and when I shipped the drive off to nationwidedatarecovery in Florida, for a mere $450 they were able to retrieve the data. Sure would like to know what they did!!

At this point, if the goal is to recover data, mount the drive in a USB 2.0 shell, connect it to a working system and copy your data for backup.

Then return the drive to the new system, and nuke and pave (reformat and reload) or try a recovery.

Is this the same drive that was recovered once before?

If you can't read the drive, you'll have to contact the data recovery service again.

I would also do a full memory scan with the diagnostics - if the drive isn't faulty, the memory may be.

And going forward, I'd invest $100 or so in an external hard drive (or a DVD writer) and keep backups.

Thanks much for your input. This is a client's personal laptop and I'm sure she will learn her backup lesson after this.

Regards,

Cathy