Wizzer Posted January 22, 2007 Posted January 22, 2007 I have a teacher with a hard drive that won't boot. It contains his reports that are due in today and his department handbook. He doesn't have a backup copy of either since his memory stick was stolen! I've tried the drive in a USB external case with no joy, is there anything else I can try before approaching data recovery centers?
ThatBoringBloke Posted January 22, 2007 Posted January 22, 2007 Have you tried the old freezer trick?
tom_newton Posted January 22, 2007 Posted January 22, 2007 There have been occasional reports that cooling a drive - 10 mins in an airtight container in the freezer - can free up stuck heads (as the metal contracts, whatever's sticking frees up), but thats a last resort and may f++k it worse. TBH, its data recovery time, which costs $TIME * $MONEY^2, for some non-zero values of $TIME and $MONEY. It might be disingeneous to suggest that this chump's time is worth far less and he should just suck it up and re-do the work, but I'm going to suggest it anyway
Wizzer Posted January 22, 2007 Author Posted January 22, 2007 I haven't tried the freezer thing, and before a couple of minutes ago hadn't even heard of it! Thanks for your thoughts. I've had some estimated costs from a contact of mine for Data Rec and I don't the school will want to stump up £600!! I think his time probably is worth that, but the school won't think so (not sure I would either if I was having to pay the bill).
tosca925 Posted January 22, 2007 Posted January 22, 2007 The freezer trick has worked for me on a few occasions. Giving me just enough time to get the data off before it packs up again.
Ben_Stanton Posted January 23, 2007 Posted January 23, 2007 Out of interest, how dead is the drive? Dead as in powering up but not being seen in BIOS or dead as in not even spinning up?
klawd Posted January 23, 2007 Posted January 23, 2007 If the drive powers up, you can use R-Studio data recovery software. It takes a while but is extremely successful at data recovery.
Wizzer Posted January 24, 2007 Author Posted January 24, 2007 The drives sounds like it spins and is making whirring and mechanical noises but in the USB case windows refuses to acknowledge there is a disc there. It sees the case electronics and tries to load the driver, but fails after a lengthy pause.
h792 Posted February 1, 2007 Posted February 1, 2007 Yeah that freezer trick worked for me too! However, I've just had a hard disk fail and this company got all the data recovered within 12 hours for about £100! They got the disk friday and I had the CD's in the post by Monday. They're called easyrestore.co.uk and I've been really really pleased with the service.
JulesF Posted March 14, 2007 Posted March 14, 2007 Does anyone have a contact number for Easyrestore.co.uk? I sent them my crashed hard drive over 2 weeks ago, and after some initial communication with them once they had received it they have failed to respond to my emails and have not sent me my data or drive back.
maniac Posted March 14, 2007 Posted March 14, 2007 Rather than try the drive in an external USB case, which sometimes won't work on certain drives, have you tried it in another PC. If it's a laptop drive, you can get converter cables to allow you to plug them into a standard IDE cable. Then you can see if the machines BIOS is seeing the drive, and see what the machine does when it tries to read the drive etc. Mike.
Elfirin Posted July 4, 2007 Posted July 4, 2007 To JulesF: Did you ever get a contact number for Easyrestore? Did they ever return your hard drive or data? And if not what did you do?
rusty155 Posted July 4, 2007 Posted July 4, 2007 Have you tried booting up with BartPE or a live linux distro to see if you can mount the drive that way? I have had many "dead" drives in the past that windows has refused to recognise but slap a linux cd in the machine and bingo!
yabbadabba Posted September 27, 2008 Posted September 27, 2008 Dead drives My first step is a quick diagnosis by using an exernal adapter to see if the drive actually spins up and makes the correct (or often incorrect) noises. This then leads too 2 x options. If the drive makes no noise at all it will get a quick tap onto a desk to make sure nothing is stuck (had this a lot with IBM Deskstars and a gentle tap on a flat surface would get them running again). If the gentle tap doesnt work and I have a spare drive lurking around then swapping the board out from underneath with an identical one often works. Not tried the fridge trick yet, cant wait too though After trying the drive in an external adapter and it appears to be working it will then be placed in any working desktop to hand as a slave, then boot up XP on the desktop check if the hard drive is visible in "my computer" or "Disk Management", If it cant be seen in either then its reboot with a LiveCD or a recovery CD. Any of the linux recovery or LiveCD's work well and will often find the drive allowing for data backup. I do use a few other recovery CD's but nout sure if I can mention them on the forums As a general rule of thumb for myself, if the drive doesnt spin, or cant be seen by the BIOS then I class it as unrepairable by myself, unless as mentioned above I have a few spare identical drives to swap bits over with but this is usually done more for the hell of it in my own time just too see if it will work.
Sirbendy Posted September 29, 2008 Posted September 29, 2008 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 Posted September 30, 2008 Posted September 30, 2008 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.
HarryMonkey Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 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 Posted June 15, 2011 Posted June 15, 2011 have you checked that all the pins are straight? These companies tend to charge a fair whack
difinity Posted June 16, 2011 Posted June 16, 2011 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. 1
chazzy2501 Posted June 16, 2011 Posted June 16, 2011 Spinrite if it can be recovered by software this is the program to do it.
Arthur Posted June 16, 2011 Posted June 16, 2011 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?
HarryMonkey Posted June 16, 2011 Posted June 16, 2011 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 Posted June 16, 2011 Posted June 16, 2011 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.
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