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Dead harddrive - recovering the data?
jps - 25/1/19 at 09:29 AM

Does anyone have (good) direct experience of companies retrieving data from hard-drives which have stopped working? And an idea on cost?

My laptop harddrive has suddenly become completely unresponsive - even in another machine - but my wife has not backed up all the videos of our children which she takes, so i'm interested in exploring whether we can try and get anything back.

jeffw - 25/1/19 at 10:26 AM

Yes, there is but it is expensive as it may well involved removing the platters in a dust free environment and mounting them in a new drive. The only time I've had to do it the cost was over £600.

Obviously it will depend on what is wrong with the drive.

I had the same situation with my wife's drive with all the video and photos of our son on it so I wasn't prepared to try and resolve the issue if there was a possibility of losing the data in the process.

These where the people I used.http://www.ontrack.com

jps - 25/1/19 at 10:28 AM

quote:
Originally posted by jeffw
Yes, there is but it is expensive as it may well involved removing the platters in a dust free environment and mounting them in a new drive. The only time I've had to do it the cost was over £600.

Obviously it will depend on what is wrong with the drive.

I had the same situation with my wife's drive with all the video and photos of our son on it so I wasn't prepared to try and resolve the issue if there was a possibility of losing the data in the process.

These where the people I used.http://www.ontrack.com


Thanks Jeff - I may put in in a drawer on the off chance I win the lottery and can then afford to risk £600!

HowardB - 25/1/19 at 11:29 AM

I had this happen on a Tosh laptop some time ago,.. so - thinking nothing to lose I did the following crazy thing,...

bought an external USB drive enclosure thing from Maplin (RIP) for about £20

dismantled the case of the HD and hooked it up to the USB thingy,. plugged that into another PC
on each attempt to access the data the drive would try to spin and fail, I simply helped it along by gently pushing the hub,
if the HDD failure mode is the same as mine then this may help.

I feel that this was probably a high risk one way trip, but I did recover most of my data.

hth

Mr Whippy - 25/1/19 at 12:22 PM

quote:
Originally posted by jps
Does anyone have (good) direct experience of companies retrieving data from hard-drives which have stopped working? And an idea on cost?

My laptop harddrive has suddenly become completely unresponsive - even in another machine - but my wife has not backed up all the videos of our children which she takes, so i'm interested in exploring whether we can try and get anything back.


hard lesson and I hope you get the data back

I've already been there and hence automatically backup all photos/vids onto google photos and documents on google drive plus have a "secret" folder on my works network with many GB of photos but I never told you this...

Both my phone and the wife's have live photo back up onto google photos into a shared area which I find so useful

SteveWalker - 25/1/19 at 12:32 PM

If you are lucky, it may be the electronics that have failed. If so, you could carefully swap the board from an identical drive.

nludkin - 25/1/19 at 08:01 PM

Sometimes the TVS diode on the drive gets fried and can be prised off to make the drive start working again. I would only suggest investigating this if you are handy with a multimeter, soldering iron and have a steady hand. There are plenty of articles online giving guidance for the procedure. However, the fact that it just stopped working makes me think that this is unlikely :-(

You might be able to swap out the electronics from a working drive, but I seem to remember that some drives have electronics "coded" to the drive, even though it might be the exact same make and model. Might be worth posting the drive specs for someone in the know to be able to comment?

I wish you luck recovering the data. I was in exactly the same place a few months back, but was lucky enough to use the TVS trick to fix it.

[Edited on 25/1/19 by nludkin]

MikeRJ - 25/1/19 at 11:49 PM

quote:
Originally posted by SteveWalker
If you are lucky, it may be the electronics that have failed. If so, you could carefully swap the board from an identical drive.


I've had success with this before on some windows based test equipment, but you do need exactly the same model of drive. The drive I had was long out of production so trawled through to eBay to find a good s/h one.

ReMan - 26/1/19 at 01:09 AM

quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJ
quote:
Originally posted by SteveWalker
If you are lucky, it may be the electronics that have failed. If so, you could carefully swap the board from an identical drive.


I've had success with this before on some windows based test equipment, but you do need exactly the same model of drive. The drive I had was long out of production so trawled through to eBay to find a good s/h one.

Yes also done this years ago when my eyes were better
And splice a hd ribbon cable
Fiddly but in the day worth it.
We’re all fallible when it comes to backups

ReMan - 26/1/19 at 01:10 AM

quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJ
quote:
Originally posted by SteveWalker
If you are lucky, it may be the electronics that have failed. If so, you could carefully swap the board from an identical drive.


I've had success with this before on some windows based test equipment, but you do need exactly the same model of drive. The drive I had was long out of production so trawled through to eBay to find a good s/h one.

Yes also done this years ago when my eyes were better
And splice a hd ribbon cable
Fiddly but in the day worth it.
We’re all fallible when it comes to backups

pmc_3 - 26/1/19 at 08:41 PM

I work for an IT Support company and we have used PC Image with good results for customer drives we couldn't recover with software.