Laptop Hard Drive Failure 3

[NickCat11]

Hello All,

Ok, I am fixing my buddies laptop and I figured out his hard drive was shot through the use of a couple diagnostic programs. I replaced the hard drive and now all is fine. The problem I am having is that I cannot get the data from the defective hard drive. I bought a converter and hooked the drive up to my pc but it just makes everything freeze up on my own pc. Out of curiosity I took out the new drive from the laptop and hooked it up to my pc and it read it like an external drive which is supposed to happen. Is there anything else I can try to extract his data (pictures mostly) off the drive? Thanks in advance.

Nick

 

[madonnac]

try freezing the drive for about 1 hour, and then copy the data onto another drive

 

[NickCat11]

Thanks for the reply. I never heard of that solution but I will defintely give it a try. Thanks again

Nick

 

[satrow]

I don't see anything here that hints towards it being a freezer job - please don't!

It sounds more like a controller board issue - electronics have packed up and it isn't being seen as a drive.

I'd wait a day or two and listen to the advice of a few more Tek-Tips members before trying to decide how to deal with it.

Can you tell us which make, model and capacity the drive is, there may be a common fault?

 

[NickCat11]

Hello,

The hard drive is an Hitachi. It's 30 gigabytes and the error that it stated when booting up was a blue screen error that stated unmountable boot volume. Also, when I power the drive up externally I hear it turn on then it doesn't seem to run smoothly from the sounds it makes. Thanks in advance for your help.

Nick

 

[Grenage]

Hi there,

We actually ahd the exact same problem about a month ago. Since windows wouldn't boot (it was booting, but after 3 hours it hadn't even started to load the desktop) we booted the machine using a Live Linux CD (Knoppix). Was fairly simple too get the data off it then.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[vamike]

A neighbors 2.5 drive died. Windows couldn't read it. The freezer trick didn't work. Knoppix worked for this Hitachi.

 

[satrow]

OK, let's tackle the 'freezer trick'!

It does work, I've supervised it myself - BUT it will only be of any use under a very limited set of circumstances, otherwise you could easily reduce your chances of recovery to zero.

The key to any data recovery is a firm diagnosis of the problem - mis-diagnosing or trusting to pot-luck with the methods used can easily lead to irrecoverable or very expensively recovered data.