I need suggestions to recover Data from a HD

[SweetRyd]

Hello everyone and thank you for reading my thread.
I have a Western Digital HD 40 Gig that seems to have over heated. I have recently installed 2 HD's as replacements in my PC. The first as Master and the second as slave. Working well, But I really would like to recover the Data from the dammaged Drive, I have read many Threads from other forums that have suggested freezing the HD i.e. putting it in the freezer (hoping that the drive is malfunctioning due to heat). This has turned out to be a hit and miss situation as far as everyone else has suggested. I would really appreciate any confirmation on this method or a better course of action. Thanking you in advance



SweetRyd

 

[edfair]

This was very effective in the "old days" of seagate 225s and others of like design where the head positioning was independent of the platter. The platters would expand with heat and the heads wouldn't be able to read the track/sector addresses because the track originally laid down was no longer tracking under the heads.
Once drives were redesigned with voice coil stepping the exact positioning became an electrical method and the mechanical solutions no longer work.
This is not to say that occasionally someone has had a drive start working after a chill, but it more likely happenstance than a valid fix.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[SweetRyd]

Thank you for your advice, I appreciate the information.
It didn't seem like a conclusive method of data retrieval, but it this point I'm willing to try just about anything short of submitting the Drive to some Lab. I have the Drive well insulated from humidity and in the freezer as I write this Post. Nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say, so I'm going to attempt this unorthodox method and hope for the best. I'll post the results later, hopefully I'll have something worthy to mention

 

[bcastner]

You might want to try:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

The deal here is that you download the software and run it on the defective drive. If it can recover through software means the data, it shows you the files it feels confident it can recover.

If you are happy with the result, you pay for a license and they send you the key to do the actual recovery. The software is not horribly expensive, and I like the try before you buy approach of this product.

Plus, it works very well.

 

[Rufusman]

Another problem is that the controller board on the drive may be faulty. You might have a changce of recovering the data if you get an identical drive (in all respects - including PCBA, Unique and other numbers) and swapped over the controllers.

If you are in Australia and you cannot find the right drive, you might like to go to

http://www.PCBsearch.com.au.

They either have the drives in stock or look for them for you.
They do not sell the drives but if they have them, they change the boards and copy the data for you for a small cost. It costs nothing if the data is not copied.