Bill Ball

That's a good suggestion. $100 from me too. Your CD's have saved me a lot more than that.

Ed Hughes

Sorry to hear this, good luck!

For the future, I have three words: Carbonite dot com!

Hilton

The freezer trick is well known amongst geek circles as a first resort.

But first place the disk in a zip-lock or other type of air-tight container before you put it in the freezer, so that moisture doesn't enter the drive.

Having said that, I'll go read the rest of the thread, where I'll probably find the same warning.. just wanted to make it clear.

jim morehouse

First, thank you for the offer to 'chip in' on recovery, I really appreciate the willingness to help out....this a great group of people. But this project was never about making money and there's still a surplus, so I'll do what I need to do to try to recover the data.

I got a PM from one of our members who works for a data recovery company so I'm going to send the hd to him and see if I can find out if/how much for data recovery. I may try the freezer trick first inside one of my machines.

The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar 200 GB 'enhanced' IDE drive, model WD2000.

Thanks again for all the suggestions and offers of help, I'll let you know how things turn out. The range of expertise on this board is incredible.

Jim
PS: If you haven't already, spend a $100 for another hard drive, get some backup software, and develop a backup routine for your data if not your whole "disk image"....believe me, you don't want to be in this situation!

Alan

Jim - I have suffered similar data loss years ago - and also should have known better...

As time goes on and we add more and more digital content (music/photos/videos...) we all have more at stake.

I now have a NAS storage device on my home network - for any of you with multiple machines I recommend this approach. The USB hard drive seems like a good idea - I had one... But moving it between systems religiously and actually doing the backups was too hard (!)

I now have a Buffalo systems 1 terrabyte system with RAID mirroring (so ~500GB avail). I use this to incrementally back up all the documents on every machine on my network once a week (I can live with loosing that much). Its always connected and backups are fully automated. I can manage it from a browser window and it sends me weekly status emails. I can also use it as a secure ftp host (so I can access some files remotely if I wish).

The best part is I store all my photos (from all machines and family members) and all my music files (from all machines and family members) on this machine. They are available to all machines at all times over the network.

All my photos & music are also backed up implicitly by the disk mirroring and none are duplicated across machines or stored in different cataloging methods. This works phenomenally well!

Highly Recommended.

Many different NAS solutions to choose from today and my whole set up was ~$700 several years ago.

I'm sure much higher capacity/lower cost now... I think NAS is the way to go here...

Alan

underdog928

Jim:

I may have gotten to this thread too late, but my company (and me personally) have done numerous data recovery operations over the years.

If you run into a dead end with the data recovery company you are trying now, let me know. I'd be glad to help.

BTW: The freezer trick works in some cases, but it depends on the problem with the drive. If the drive is over heating for some reason (old drive) it expands the platter and the heads will not be able to calibrate to the expanded track locations. If putting it in the freezer makes the clicking sound (recal) go away, then the drive electronics are OK and you should be able to get all your data off by repeating this process over and over again.

Let me know if I can help and good luck.

SwayBar

If the hard drive works afterwards, immediately dump it's contents all at once without stopping.

Shmurzik

I am in

Hawkeyes

Jim,

I have used and recommended an application called 'Get Data Back' by Runtime (http://www.runtime.org/).

You can download a trial copy & see if it will recover the data. If so, you have to buy the app to actually get the data recovered. Of all the different software recovery app's I've tried, this is the only one that actually worked. Hope it will work for you.

Hawk

FlyingDog

PC Inspector File Recovery worked slightly for me. Similar situation to you with an external USB drive. I removed it from the case. Orienting the drive at different angles changed speed and accuracy of the files recovered. I was trying to recover jpgs so I ended up with a lot of partial pictures. Text files were also recovered. Word documents and pdfs were worthless as partial files.

I tried several other programs and the freezer trick. None of them helped.

Somebody else mentioned it above but it's worth repeating. Pull as much off the drive at once. Repeated tries will only decrease your chance of recovering anything.

davek9

If is clicking it is most likely the electronics and no amount of disk recovery tools will work, this could be why the “freezer trick” works for some.
As this would be similar to using a can of cold spray and or a heat gun on an circuit board to find a weak component, but in this case you’re cooling them all, don’t think the platter(s) would like it much.
Like someone already posted, seal it in a plastic bag, you do not want any moisture in the drive.

I have had some success in the past by quickly removing the cover and re-positioning the heads (push them very gently to the inner edge) and re-install the cover. Do this in a clean area don’t breath on the platters and QUICKLY re-install the cover.
You could also look for the head drive spindle (some extend to the outside and try to rotate it, thus moving the heads.

Once this is done the drive usually doesn’t last too long, but long enough to get your data off. I have only done this to drives that I did not give a Sh$t about.

I think the best suggestion here was to buy a like drive and swap the electronics, as all the
“smart” stuff is on the outside of the sealed enclosure.

If the data is really worth it to you then send it out..!

If you never opened a drive up, you should do it anyway just for kicks....

Dave K

FlyingDog

I don't know what the platters are made of in WD Caviars. Be careful, the platters in IBM Deskstars are usually glass, fragile, and tend to shatter sending shrapnel everywhere if broken. That also happens to be the best 'feature' of IBM/Hitachi hard drives.

davek9

Even a better reason not to smack one on the side, I have only see alumimin disks.
I'll have open up some of the newer IBM's as they fail or get out dated, I think glass would make some nice wall art.

ODSharkBytes

Jim, try this first. I lost a HD and bought a replacement. I installed the new drive as a master and the old drive as a slave, then used the setup disk that came with the new drive. The disk had simple tools that allowed me to access the old drive, and transfer, partition for partition, the entire HD.

Bill Ball

Jim:

How is the recovery going?