Any suggestions on fibar hard drive.

[tosca925]

My mate has dropped his hard drive round today for me to look at. He works from home and does not back up, over 6 years of work................!!!! The HD no longer boots into in the OS and after a while it clicks loudly. It allows me to access it for around 5 mins but when i copy a folder over it does not copy the contents.

 

I know the drives is basically fu**ed but i wondered if you lot had any last chance suggestions.???

[GrumbleDook]

Give it to a recovery expert?

 

Depending on the drive you can remove the platters and put them into another drive (same drive, same controller) but it is about 5 years since I did that (rescuing an 80MB drive from an Apple LCIII).

[ajbritton]

There must be some DIY HDD recovery solutions somewhere on the Internet. Just about everything else has been done...

[eejit]

I've had previous success with the old "stick it in the freezer" trick. Put it in a bag, put the bag in the freezer for a few hours. It'll often give you enough time to boot up and copy your important data before the clicking starts again.

[Dos_Box]

It sounds like the controller has gone belly up. No amount of 'software recovery' will help here. If your friend values his work then they sould look at paying out several hundred pounds for someone to recover it for them.

[indie]

From past experience clicking coming from the drive is usually to do with the motor or bearings, there is no real good way of home recovery for this.

 

Unless your friend has a few hundred pounds to have the data recovered the only other solution I can suggest is to find another drive of the same model (ebay?) and to open the drive. Transfer the platters to the new drive and hope that the broken bearing's havent made the heads crash onto the platter.

 

You will need some very small torx bit's, uncoted latex gloves and the cleanest room you can find.

 

Don't exepext the "new" drive to work for months if you try this procedure, the dust and dirt that WILL have gotten in it will have an effect on the drive life. Buy a new drive and make sure he backs his data up!