Tips on Recovering a Dead Drive.

[klownska]

Hi,
I have a Seagate 80 Gb ATA drive which failed the other day. It's in a pretty noisy place but I'm pretty sure it's not spinning, as the system won't boot when it's connected, even as a slave. It has 1 NTFS, 5 EXT3, and one FAT partition on it. Does anyone have any tips on what I can do to save this drive before I go out and spend $1000 trying to recover the data.
Thanx in advance. . . . .

*Duct tape is kinda of like the Jedi Force,
It has a dark side, and a light side, and
it holds the world together*

 

[kiddpete]

Try GetDataBack. It's recovered a lot of data for me so far, and can be used in trial mode. I have seen several comments here about it.

 

[klownska]

Thanks for the suggestion but my machine won't boot with the drive connected, so I can't use any recovery software yet, I've played with that and Ontrack before, but they are useless at this stage.

*Duct tape is kinda of like the Jedi Force,
It has a dark side, and a light side, and
it holds the world together*

 

[dbData]

You need to verify if the drive is spinning or trying to spin. Put it up to your ear when you are applying power. If it's grunting like it's trying to spin, it likely has stiction. You'll find an article with some information that might help at

http://www.data-recovery-hub.com/library/hard-drive-stiction.pdf

If it's not spinning or even trying, you can try replacing the PCB. You'll find information about that at

http://www.data-recovery-hub.com/library/Seagate-PCB.pdf.

Good Luck!


Rick

http://www.data-recovery-hub.com

 

[kiddpete]

If it's not spinning, try wrapping it well in plastic and put it in the freezer overnight. It may spin when it's cold.

 

[4nd7]

Does the BIOS detect your harddisk??? If is not detected by the BIOS then the controller is down and you have to replace it with one from an exactlly the same harddisk model.
If is not spinning you may try to shake it up and down perpendicular to the floor like you would use a hammer with a nail.
You also could put it in a plastic bag and let it in the freezer for 12 hours, try and recover the data and after it's getting warm, put it again in the freezer.
If you can't make it spin, you can forget about it.

 

[klownska]

Thanx for the responses guys, this turned out to be a PEBKAC issue. I left the drive sitting on the verandah for a few days (it's cold out there) and then when I tried again I was able to boot from a floppy and rewrite the MBR. Not sure if there was a problem and the drive needed some downtime, or if I just freaked out at the thought of losing all that data.

*Duct tape is kinda of like the Jedi Force,
It has a dark side, and a light side, and
it holds the world together*