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Data recovery from knackered hard drive
steve m - 26/9/07 at 06:07 PM

Does any one know if this is possible ?

I have 20gb hard drive from daughters PC, that does not want to boot up, and was (not now!) making horrible noises
The data required are pictures, of my grandson growing up, my wife (nanny) and daughter are very upset, that we may lose all of these piccys

I on the other hand have been nagging daughter for about 2 years to transfer all the data on to disk, yet 25yr olds know best !!!


steve

David Jenkins - 26/9/07 at 06:14 PM

Some time ago I bought one of these things:

Easy IDE

You take a typical hard drive, plug this gizmo into it, then connect the USB plug to a working computer. It's like having a super-huge flash drive.

It's probably your best chance of picking data off a ropey drive...

HTH,
David

MkIndy7 - 26/9/07 at 06:14 PM

You best bet would be to put it into another computer as a 2nd drive, and try to read it that way. You might be lucky, sometimes its just the part of the disk with the operating system on that has gone faulty.

Although if it has been making horrible noises already... you might have missed your Sign from him up above!

Catpuss - 26/9/07 at 06:19 PM

Yep put it in a PC as a slave if you can (or get a new drive install that then put the old one as salve). You can then possibly rebuild the master boot record (boot sector, MBR). If you are lucky this may be the main culprit. After that, try repartioning (but not formatting).

There are some data recovery specialists around but it can cost alot.

MikeR - 26/9/07 at 06:20 PM

if it comes to it - there are companies that can recover the data, they aren't cheap, but if the images are priceless then they are.

They do things like physically take the drive apart and put the media bit into another drive etc.

David Jenkins - 26/9/07 at 06:30 PM

I did a google search, and found that the data recovery companies are very cagey about costs!

This one is honest enough to declare its price - standard cost £135.

ecosse - 26/9/07 at 06:56 PM

This is about as good as it gets without involving data recovery companies

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Cheers

Alex

clockwork - 26/9/07 at 07:17 PM

Regarding data recovery companies: Be very careful. I can't name names but have seen a number of people stung for lots of money. The last company tried would have paid for a family of four a holiday abroad for a week. They are very good at sorting out mechanical failure, but when it comes to swapping platters then you are into 1:4 recovery rates.
I wish you the very best.

mstepien - 26/9/07 at 07:25 PM

I have used this two free tools : TestDisk and PhotoRec with some success. You can find them here : http://www.cgsecurity.org/

But of course you will have to be able to plug the disk as a secondary, although there is a dos version so it might be possible to boot and run these tools from a floppy, but the program works by copying files somewhere else so you will have to have another disk anyway.

Good luck,

Michal

ReMan - 26/9/07 at 09:02 PM

I did a similar job in the past that was worth me buying another identical model hard disk from ebay for little money,and swapping the platters mysef to recover data .
ISTR getting about 80% off it and carrying on using it for a good while after.
Desperate measures..............

James - 27/9/07 at 01:37 AM

quote:
Originally posted by ReMan
I did a similar job in the past that was worth me buying another identical model hard disk from ebay for little money,and swapping the platters mysef to recover data .
ISTR getting about 80% off it and carrying on using it for a good while after.
Desperate measures..............


I'm impressed.

I tried that several times with dodgy drives at work (when I did desktop support many moons ago).

Was never successful once!

Never wanted any data- just experimenting, so maybe should have done it in a cleaner environment than my desk in a busy office!


Also, I have one old drive where the heads crashed so badly, and the user left it running so long, that they've cut probably 30-50% of the way through the platter!

Cheers,
James

[Edited on 27/9/07 by James]

DaveFJ - 27/9/07 at 10:06 AM

If the hard disk itself is failing, I have had success in the past by putting the hard drive in the freezer (inside a sealed plastic bag) for a couple of hours then whipping it out plugging it in and running up straight away. this allowed me to access the drive for about 4-5 minutes before it got too hot again... needless to say it took several trips to the freezer before I had recovered the files I wanted!

HTH

geoff shep - 27/9/07 at 11:14 AM

Those usb/IDE cables as in the first reply are really good. I've used Diskinternals software fro recovering files from an unreadable CD and can recommend that - they also list stuff for recovery from FAT or NTFS discs which may be worth a try Diskinternals the free trial version will probably let you see if there's anything recoverable but I expect you will have to pay (I did for mine) for the full version to actually recover it.