hard drive failed / data lost?

[Sirbendy]

I had one full of a member of staffs family photos that was DOA...freezing worked for the time it took to heat back up. In the end I ran the drive upside down on my desk and kept blatting the thing with the freeze spray we use on chewing gum.

[difinity]

I've done a fair few hard drive recovery jobs, forget the USB thingy and get one of those cables that converts the hard drive connector to IDE, i get much better results with the computer seeing the drive.

I think maplins sell them for about a fiver.

[stevenewman]

Just to drag this one out again, my O/H's Win7 laptop went belly up last night ... won't boot, no HDD in the BIOS. I tried it in a USB caddy on my win7 laptop and it wouldn't see it. I tried it in a different caddy on an XP machine at work today and it saw the drive in My Computer, but double clicking it gave a "E:\ is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." It doesn't show as a drive in Disk Management.

I tried booting a linux CD and tried to acces it via that and it doesn't see the drive. The drive is an 80G Hitachi IDE drive.

It doesn't seem to be making any noises when I connect the USB lead so I'm assuming it's dead. Are there any inexpensive companies around that could recover the data (music and photos mainly)? Are there any other tricks that I could try (what does the freezer trick involve?)

All contributions gratefully accepted.

[tom_newton]

have you checked that all the pins are straight? These companies tend to charge a fair whack

[difinity]

I paid just shy of a grand to get a 40Gb IDE hard drive recovered when a drive died on me.
You could try to find an identical drive and swop the circuit board over.
I'd recomend Ontrack for recovery, certainly not cheap, but i couldn't fault their service when i needed them.

[chazzy2501]

Spinrite if it can be recovered by software this is the program to do it.

[Arthur]

You could try to find an identical drive and swop the circuit board over.

Unless you have one already, it's going to be tricky to find a HDD which has exactly the same model number (e.g. WD10EACS-00D6B0) and firmware revision.

I assume restoring from a recent backup isn't an option?

[stevenewman]

The pins are all straight on the drive. I think I'm gonna try the circuit board swap first and see if that does the trick. Failing that I guess I'll have to start saving my pennies : (

[chazzy2501]

My home server runs from a 2.5" 40GB IDE drive, every week or so XP crashes and the drive make a clicking noise but if I give it an hour to cool down it runs fine again. Sorry I didn't see that you'd brought back an old thread and spinrite can't save you here. I did once recover an old server drive by placing a squirrel cage fan directly to the HDD circuit whilst I copied / recovered it.

[stevenewman]

Well, the PCB swap didn't do anything : (