Access a dead hard drive?

[Guest]

Yesterday, my 20G hard drive crashed for the first (and last) time. It is dead now. The motherboard does not recognize the drive as being installed at all. I have swapped the drive into another identical machine. Same problem. I have crucial data that I need to recover from that drive. I appreciate any hint/help that you can provide
(it was on a Win2K Professional machine and was NTFS formatted)
Thanks.
Linh

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by yaow5 on 12/19/01 09:41 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[pike]

Well don't know of any apps that will recover your data but i do know, as you probably are, that you can find specialised shops that do data recovery from crashed dd.
In the yello pages i would guess.

Danny

Electric coolaid for everyone, except me, never touch the stuff !

 

[Lars_Coleman]

If the drive isn't being detected at POST then there isn't going to be any software to access it.

Check out:::
<A HREF="http://www.data-recovery.com" target="_new"><font color=blue>Reynolds Data Recovery</font color=blue></A>
<A HREF="http://www.drivesavers.com" target="_new"><font color=green>Drive Savers</font color=green></A>
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<font color=red>1GHz AMD x MSI K7T-Turbo x 512MB PC133 x 2-Maxtor 30GB/RAID 0 = Stream Line Butterfly</font color=red>

 

[btvillarin]

I read this in a LockerGnome newsletter for 11/26/01:

"Chilling Your Hard Drive
Scribbled by Lee Houde

<A HREF="http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/techspecialist/20011026.html" target="_new">http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/techspecialist/20011026.html</A>


Reading Randy's remarks in the latest Tech Specialist on the crash of his laptop's hard drive reminded me of when my hard drive crashed this summer - and of the unusual fix it took to recover the data. It all started when I booted my computer one morning. Instead of the usual cacophony of hums, clicks, and buzzes to which I'd become accustomed, all I heard was the lonesome wail of a drive head vainly searching a platter for a byte of data. Kinda like the sound your floppy makes when you click on the "A:" icon without a diskette in the drive - only this time, it was coming from my hard drive and went on for several minutes. Then the ominous message popped up on my monitor: "HDD Failure," and nothing else happened.

I tried rebooting. I tried my Win98 boot disk, my Norton Recovery disk, my McAfee Emergency disk. I tried to restore my boot sector. I tried to restore my partition data. Nothing. Just "HDD Failure." As far as all my disaster recovery software was concerned, I didn't even have a hard drive in my machine. My hard drive had gone south, taking with it tons of data I had been meaning to backup - but never got around to.

My bag of tricks exhausted, I turned to some techie friends to see what they had up their sleeves. One came up with what seemed like the most off-the-wall suggestion I had ever heard of. Chill that hard drive! Yup, chuck it in the ol' deep freeze for an hour or so. Use that hour to round up another hard drive and some drive cloning software (I used Drive2Drive). Install the new hard drive as a slave. Take the old hard drive out of the freezer and reinstall it as the master and fire up the system. Amazingly, it worked like a charm. The old HDD booted up just like it always had. I launched Drive2Drive and cloned the old drive to the new one. Less than a half hour later, I was out of the swamp and back on easy street. I had a brand new, healthy hard drive with all my software and data perfectly restored and functional. I could breathe easy again.

Neither I nor my techie friend have any idea why freezing the old hard drive got it working again. Being an engineer, I could postulate about misalignment caused by repeated thermal expansion / contraction cycles, and the severe contraction caused by the deep freeze bringing all the parts back to the original design alignment. My friend thought it might be a deterioration of the read head itself (which the freezing somehow cured). All I know is that it worked for me, and it might work for you also. One last thought - if you think you might need to use this trick yourself sometime, make sure you have a copy of it someplace other than on your hard drive. Once the disk crashes, you're not going to be able to get at this tip to know what you have to do!"

-----

I wonder if this'll help out any? I guess it can't hurt. I mean, it's already dead right now...

<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/btvillarin" target="_new">My Website</A> - updated basically everyday.

 

[Crashman]

IF the PCB died, you can rescue the drive by using the PCB from an identicle drive. If the motor died, you might be screwed, recovery services are expensive. But then there's always the deep freeze?

What's the frequency, Kenneth?