Drive recovery? Anyone done it?

[mikester]

My wife's laptop hard drive failed tonight - clickety click click click click click.


Yay. Backup's a little old too so that's gonna suck.

She says a friend of hers knows someone that does drive recovery so I'll call them tomorrow if she gets me the number. I called a couple of drive recovery companies and they quoted generally between $700 and $2700.

So...yeah...that happened...

[widebody911]

We've had to do it @ work for a couple of laptop drives that the people insisted they be recovered. I remember the PC support guy grumbling about one of them that turned out to have nothing particularly special on it other than some movies the guy had downloaded.

He also uses some recovery tool that takes a long time to run, but I guess it's generally successful. I can get details if you wish.

[mikester]

details wouldn't hurt but I can't even get the computer to recognize the drive and it makes quite a racket when plugged in.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by mikester

details wouldn't hurt but I can't even get the computer to recognize the drive and it makes quite a racket when plugged in.

I haven't done it for a long time, but usually it involves buying the same drive, then swapping the disks, etc, all done in a clean room. Not cheap. She better have something worth it on the disk...

This is why we do weekly backups...

[slodave]

I can do it for you Mike. At least I can give it a try.

Edit: Give me a call tomorrow after 11:00 am.

Dave

[Scuba Steve]

Originally Posted by red-beard

I haven't done it for a long time, but usually it involves buying the same drive, then swapping the disks, etc, all done in a clean room. Not cheap. She better have something worth it on the disk...

This is why we do weekly backups...

What he said. And if the head crashed (which it doesn't sound like because that's always sounded pretty horrible when I've been around one) some parts are not recoverable.

[Gogar]

Ahhhhhhh. Click of death. BTDT and I learned my lesson. I'm sorry, Mike.

What everybody said, recovery includes tearing apart and basically reassembling with known good parts.

[mikester]

Originally Posted by slodave

I can do it for you Mike. At least I can give it a try.

Edit: Give me a call tomorrow after 11:00 am.

Dave

Really?

I mean, I've got the tools but not the 'clean room' (or hands for that matter) or an identical drive.

I'm a pretty technical person overall and reasonably good with hardware - I've taken these drives apart (well - larger ones).

How can you do it? Other than the obvious of taking it apart and rebuilding it...

What she has on it isn't worth spending big bucks on trying to salvage. She has a backup (In fact a few) but it's a little dated. We were actually just working out our backup strategies. Last week I had handed her a USB hard drive to backup to. She just hadn't done it yet.

There are some pictures from her iphone on there of the kids but most of the good ones have been uploaded to facebook.

She seems very not worried about this - My biggest concern was her email archive. I think that is the only thing we don't really have a back up.

[slodave]

Clean rooms are overrated, unless you are in the business of drive recovery. I've only torn into a hard drive once and for that, I just spent about 2 hrs. scrubbing down one of my bathrooms. Clicking drives are not easy to fix at home. There's probably a good chance that at the end of the swap it'll still click. The drive heads jumped off their "track" and are trying to find the sectors. I have a white paper on all of this, but it's sitting on another hard drive that is not accessible at the moment.

When I first posted, I did not read the part about the drive not being recognized at all. I probably can't help in your case. I do know of a recovery company that is relatively inexpensive and do a good job.

Dave

[nynor]

one word: freezer. and a means to back the drive up quickly.

[slodave]

I don't think the freezer will work in this case. If the drive was clicking and recognized, there would be a chance.

Mike you can try that. I put the HD into a static bag with the small bag of beads (drawing a blank on the name) seal it and put it in the freezer for a few hours. As nynor said, have a computer ready and connect the drive as quickly as possible.

The only bad part about freezing, is the condensation as it warms up...

[porsche4life]

Originally Posted by slodave

small bag of beads

Silica Gel? You can buy it in 2lb bags at Harbor freight... Supposed to put it in Air Tool dryers.... it works in other stuff....

[mikester]

Put it in the freezer - I will be way surprised if it works but who knows - I did a few searches on the net and there is evidence that it does. I might have to try a few times. Maybe I'll wrap it in cold bags while I work with it to keep it from warming up too much. If I can get the data off - I'll be a hero to myself at least.

Thanks guys - this board never stops to amaze me.

[nynor]

yeah, you'll have to keep it COLD, with capital C, while you are pulling the data off of it.

yeah, i've done a little computer work....

[mikester]

freezer didn't work.

[nynor]

yeah, its always a long shot.

sorry, man.

[slodave]

There is not much else to do other than surgery. Switching PCB's won't work. Taking the platter and putting it into another HD may work, but this is probably something left to the pro's.

[A930Rocket]

I had the same problem. Took it to Cherry Systems in Marietta/Atlanta GA. They couldn't fix mine, but they were the best price if they could. ~$750 I want to say.

No charge since they couldn't do it.

[mikester]

I think we're just going to let it go...

But I won't let her start using it again until she's been shown how to back it up. I'm rebuilding it tonight.

[mikester]

Well, she found something this morning that she did not have an acceptable backup of...looks like I'm going to send it in to someone...

fan-damn-tastic...