Hard Drive Recovery
 

Dear Braintrust,

I had a Hard Drive quit working on me. Unfortunetly I had a lot of important photos, & documents on this drive. Do any of you have any suggestions for how I would go about having this data recovered? Or any suggested companies to take it to?

It was in a computer that was accidentally left on over the weekend. There were some awkward sounds coming from the computer when I sat down to work on monday. I shut it down and restarted, then realized that the drive was no longer recognized. Not sure if that indicates that the hard-drive was physically damaged or not. For reference it is a seagate barracuda 7200.11. 500GB

I took it out of the computer and put it into another one, but the second computer gave no indication that there was a drive there. No awkward sounds either. (I did use the same data cord)

Thanks,
Rich

Can you hear or feel it spin up?

Is it seen in your hardware list?

If yes can you select it to format? DON'T FORMAT IT. Just trying to see if it's recognized at the hardware level.

If you get that far you may be able to recover.

If not you still can but it starts to get really expensive.

I will double check and see if I can feel/hear it spinning.

When I have had it connected to a computer, and I go to select "computer" to look at all the installed drives. The hard drive I am trying to get to is not on the list.

Hi Rich,
I had a drive go bad a few years ago. I took it to a local computer shop and they couldn't recover anything. Somehow, I discovered this software from a German company

www.element5.com
Kernel Recovery for FAT & NTFS

and was able to recover every file!

Good luck.

Put the drive in a freezer bag then into the freezer for a day.

Then plug it back into the original computer and turn it on. Hopefully it will be good for ONE try at this.

Then plug in a LARGE USB drive and copy everything you can to the drive. Although its prolly not needed, after this, take a large hammer to the hard drive to secure your data will not be copied from it and toss the puppy in the trash (or recycle bin)!

Thanks for the tips guys.

I will try Scott's method first:) Some of the Photos missing are from the tour de colorado drive we did way back in '06! I think I can recover those from a saved CD or from an old laptop though.

THe biggest thing (most important to me) that is missing that can't be recovered, are some photos of my son from May to July. I had done a really good job of backing everything up, so the bulk of it I can locate. Just hadn't backed up that recent stuff yet.

I'll keep you all posted on how it turns out.

Rich

+1 I have had good luck with this method. It usually fails after twenty minutes or so, though.

If all else fails, send it to me and I'll take it to work (computer forensics lab) and get the data back for you!! No charge for a Pelican!

This does work!
You can keep the drive cool by running canned air (it is really a refrigerant, currently R-112) over it while it is running.
My wife's hard drive crashed last month and a friend of mine took the drive out and was able to connect with some cabling tools to his computer and copied the drive.
It was much easier to keep canned air running over the drive while it was lying on the table connected externally to his computer.

Generous offer. Bravo!

You can get these external drive cables at any good computer store for around $10-15. I use them all the time and they work especially good with situations like this.

No need for the refrigerant, get a frozen ice pack, put it in a plastic bag to keep it from seeping on the drive and put it on top of the drive while on a desk. Keeps it frosty and spinning while you are copying the data.

I was able to get my wife's cousin's pictures off his "dead" hard drive a few months ago. His father died and these were the most recent pictures he had of his father... It made me feel good to be able to recover the pictures for him!

My son just fixed my daughters hard drive that crashed in her laptop at school. Used an external hard drive (both ATA) and was able to swap that crashed hard drive into the external and find the resource back up and reinstall. He as able to find most of her data on his Mac Book when it was on the external hard drive. Lesson is that it is mostly recoverable in the right hands.

Yup, freezer works. Shrinks the entire mechanism just enough to get you back into spec so you can get the data off. That being said, get the data off! It doesn't last long.

Hope you have success. I'll remember the freezer trick. Get off-site backup like carbonite in the future. I live in brush fire country, so its a must.

I've used this procedure with success in the past:

Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD - How-To Geek

In my case a laptop would not boot up. So I used the Ubuntu CD to boot the machine and used a recovery program to find and copy all jpg's to an external drive. Took a long time to scan the drive and copy the files, but it worked. YMMV.

If the Barracuda -drive is just completely silent ("dead") on power / or the computer does not recognize the drive at all (with drive, cables properly installed), usually culprit is just the (green) controller card at the bottom of the drive.

- Swap it from a working similar drive ---> should work okay for years.
- You need a small Torx -head screw-driver to open the screws at the bottom.

Have had about 10-15 of those and similar Maxtor drives fail. 8 out of 10 they've been the cards, 2 out of ten started to get massive amounts of bad inodes. Always managed to salvage data though.. they are good drives.

Please let us know how it goes..

anyone know about using a drive sled hooked into another computer to hold that HDD and transfer the files?

THIS! ^

I've done this a few times in the past. Basically, just remove the external "system board" from a know good identical drive and install it on the failed drive.

Of course, finding an identical drive may prove to be quite a challenge.

Randy