Self recovery of data in failed harddisk

[zizou]

Hi,

I have a 2.5" USB2.0 5400RPM external seagate harddrive that has recently failed which contains some very important data.

However, the USB hdd is used to store classified information in the military. Hence I am not allowed to send the hdd out for servicing or to professional data recovery centres.

The hdd cannot be recognised by windows at all. The green LED at the front panel changes to red every 10 seconds or so. So I guess data recovery programs are out since the hdd cannot even be recognised and viewed right? I have tried listening closely to the hdd and there are no weird noises.

I am willing to try all means and ways to recover the data as long as it does not involve sending the hdd out of the military camp. Money is not a problem ( our army is rich ) and I seriously do not care if the hdd gets damaged in the process of recovery. I have a few ideas:

1) Get a new external USB enclosure in case the enclosure is damaged
2) Tearing the USB enclosure out and hooking up the 2.5" hdd to a PC via IDE. However, it seems that the 2.5" hdd does not have a port for connecting to the PSU. Is there any ways to go about this?

All suggestions greatly appreciated. Thx.

 

[lafontma]

as for the 2nd option, you can buy a 2.5 to 3.5 ide connector. They are cheap and will permit you to connect the drive to a standard IDE connector.

 

[firemist]

Pulling the drive and seeing if you can recognize it in a desktop is your best approach. You can pick up an adaptor that has the power connecter pretty cheaply. Like this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010010353&Submit=ENE&Subcategory=353&Description=2%2E5+ide+adapter&Ntk=all

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812203012

It may be the usb interface is bad and with something like this you can access the drive. If not there are recovery tools available.

Edit: added second link for specific adapter

 

[blunc]

I would go with changing the HDD to a new enclosure first, I had a 3.5HHD in an external enclosure that quit working so I took it out and slaved it to an internal drive and it worked. After that I only buy external enclosures that have fans in them.

I have seen adapters for 2.5" to 3.5" IDE drives, I don't have a link but they're out there. They usually have a small power connector on them (same as the one that connects to floppy drives).

 

[nukemaster]

for the price it never hurts to have a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter.....

If windows does not detect the drive then...it most likely dead(to an end user....professional companies(like Ontrack) who do data recovery can get it back...but at a cost)....

I am surprised that any military organization would not have data recovery software and hardware....

Whats the lesson here? Always backup your data....

and in your case...if you cant get the drive running for recovery....Make sure you destroy that sucker good....Magnets then fire work good....

 

[bjmarler]

If you are able to ever get the BIOS to recognize the drive, try a program called SpinRite. If you cant' get a copy, pm me.. I have some info for ya.

 

[zizou]

Hi,

thx everyone for your replies... appreciated greatly... shall try everything on monday...

well our organization does have a department which will recover the data.. however, we might get into loads of trouble with them due to the fact that we did not encrypt our data in the hdd, which I think its in breach of our army's rules (not the US army btw)...

just hope I can recover some data from the hdd. thx guys...

 

[technology-sponge]

hmmmm... i thought all countires req'd hard disk encryption of some sort... but then looking at the US's FBI fiascos, apparantly not lol

Is the data in hdd actually critical? cuz it might be getting better yelled at/whatever discipline is in the army, that getting your arse roasted when the top brass requests the data.


BTW, nearly all large data recovery services are 100% confidential, seeing as they (ie ontrack, payam etc) deal with military and governement orgainisations often.

 

[croc]

Utter bull shit. Or you're the stupidist (is that a word?) dumbass on earth.

 

[Zorg]

I would definitely get the 2.5 to 3.5 adapter and slave it on the IDE. I've never used it but I've heard good things about the SpinRite suggested earlier. From what I've seen, Steve Gibson is well respected by his peers.
Here is a link:
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Edit: Make sure the SMART is turned on in BIOS and, assuming the drive spins, it will give you a smart failure on the BIOS boot up screen. If it is failing, don't try to get the data off without SpinRite or you may completely destroy it before you can use SpinRite. Check grc.com, they have a lot of information on failing HDDs.

 

[zizou]

hmmmm... i thought all countires req'd hard disk encryption of some sort... but then looking at the US's FBI fiascos, apparantly not lol

Yea, my army do require some sort of encryption. however, as the external hdd is only used in non-Internet systems, we did no encrypt it, which is really causing us shitload of trouble.

Is the data in hdd actually critical? cuz it might be getting better yelled at/whatever discipline is in the army, that getting your arse roasted when the top brass requests the data.

that is exactly my view too, since I am only in the army due to compulsory service and I don't really care if I got my arse roasted. unfortunately my head of department don't think so and he's pretty afraid of everything. So I am given this unfortunate task of recovering the data since I plugged the thing out of the USB port without safely removing it right in front of him.

BTW, nearly all large data recovery services are 100% confidential, seeing as they (ie ontrack, payam etc) deal with military and governement orgainisations often.

Yep, I am aware of that too. However, the more well-known ones like ontrack and payam don't have offices in my country. We have a few small ones, but I guess the security dept is suspicious of everything.

 

[Ninjaz7]

Ever heard the term XXit creek without a paddle,thats you....Its prolly roasted,try a 3.5 to 2.5 but your gonna find out its well done.The hell with your discipline ,you gotta think of our country and protecting it(weather you give a xxit or not).Its our america....luv it or leave it.I believe a honest mistake is ok but not giving a XXit thats unexcuseable,and to think this is our backbone to the future. 8O

 

[zizou]

haha.. don't worry I aren't in the US army... on the contrary, I don't mind being roasted so as to recover the critical data we need...

will the hdd gets very easily roasted if I didn't safely remove it before plugging it out? very often I can't safely remove it as windows keep complaining it can't remove it... although I have already closed every window or program that opens it...

 

[Zorg]

Ever heard the term XXit creek without a paddle,thats you....Its prolly roasted,try a 3.5 to 2.5 but your gonna find out its well done.The hell with your discipline ,you gotta think of our country and protecting it(weather you give a xxit or not).Its our america....luv it or leave it.I believe a honest mistake is ok but not giving a XXit thats unexcuseable,and to think this is our backbone to the future. 8O

That's hilarious. I guess you didn't read his post that included this:

which I think its in breach of our army's rules (not the US army btw)...

:roll:

 

[Ninjaz7]

Whew...it was early and ya I didn't catch it but it's todays mantality,what do you think todays 19 year old ,pc gamer/corpral/newbie is thinkin about 8O .We can only hope for the best...let us know what the saga unravels,there's a chance that it could stay up for 5 min's at a time and after 20 times you have the data recovered as good as new...But always think the worst,have 2 backups of the super important things and 1 of the stuff you could live with looseing(or at least survive).It could be 10 years it could be tommorrow,back it up,gl .

 

[Zorg]

So true

 

[blue68f100]

From what i have read you may have just corrupted the table.

Get the adapter to mount the 2.3 in a desktop.

Then boot spinrite and select option 2 for recovery. And let it do its thing. It works well. I've started using the maintance mode to check new installs, even on raid drives out of system.

SpinRite can be found at www.grc.com

good luck

 

[Paperdoc]

Hmmm, there is a lot of discussion of total disasater here, dead HDD, etc. Then part way through you tell us the final action before failure was that you unplugged the external HDD (on USB conncetion) without going through "safely remove", etc. What you may well have done is simply to disconnect while the OS still had not finished writing info to the HDD. In that case there would be no hardware failure - just some very confused data tables in the Directory and FAT structure on the disk. If that's the case, some of the commercial disk-fixer software, like Spinrite as suggested, should be able to solve that problem so that you can use the disk again, plus restore almost all of the data stuctures so that the files are useable. Go with this software-fix approach first. I don't know whether it will make it any easier to pull the HDD from its case and hook up (via adapter) directly to the on-board IDE controller.