I'm hoping someone on here can assist me in this endeavor because it's painstaking but I can not afford to lose.
About a year ago my wife was compiling all of our digital pictures along with all the digital pictures that we had up to that point of our kids since they were born. Pictures were coming from thumbdrives, CD's, memory cards, etc. I had a Western Digital 500GB external hard drive that I was not using so I told her to utilize that one and that we would then purchase something bigger to back it up. Well she would unplug the USB cable from the laptop to plug it into the desktop a quite a few times but she did so without ejecting it properly. She would literally just pull the cable thinking it would be fine. Needless to say she plugged it in one time and nothing appeared on the drive.
Fast forward to now and now that I'm settled in over here I wanted to try and recover at least some of those memories. My dilemma is I'm not sure where to start. I've tried Recuva but nothing. I'm almost tempted to go and start purchasing all the data recovery software here on base one by one and see what works.
My last option is to send it to a data recovery specialist that I know will charge me a few limbs but I'm almost willing to pay it to recover those pictures.
Any assistance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated. Some info on what I'm currently running:
Windows 7 32-bit
Western Digital 500GB
Thanks in advance