jim morehouse

I should know better, but I haven't been too religious about backing up my hard drives and it has come back to haunt me. I lost a 200gb hard drive and it was where I was storing data for the next issue of the Technical Publications CDs as well as some of the ROW shop manual stuff. I did a backup some time ago but I fear that there is newer stuff that is not backed up.

I contacted one company that recovers data from HDs and they said it could range anywhere from $500 to $2000 IF its possible to recover. Is there anyone on the board who can help me do this or suggest a firm (hopefully cheaper) to do it?

Symptoms:
This was a USB drive. It's no longer recoginized. Re-installing and XP gives me "problem with your hardware" message. I've tried pulling it out of the case and installing it in the computer, but still won't work. It makes a periodic "clicking" noise that I'd never heard before.

With the cost of large external hard drives so low, there's no excuse for failing to backup your data...a painful lesson.

So any hard drive experts out there who can help?

TIA
Jim

AO

NOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

fabric

I can't offer a huge amount of advice. Did you try it with another computer? If something mechanical failed, there may be a good chance stuff can be recovered, unless of course something went loose and is bouncing on the surface of the disks. But it could still be a USB issue and it's not being able to communicated with the computer could be causing the problems. Do other USB devices work in that port? Did you try a different USB port? These are all low probability I"ll admit, but they are free and quick.

69gaugeman

I have a disk duplication system that I have successfully cloned drives that would give me a boot disk error when powering up. If the drive powers up I would be willing to try for you.

PM me

Chrisp3

Jim, I know this is going to sound crazy...but a trick that I have had some success with in the past (depending on how badly the disk is damaged) is to place the drive in the freezer for 10-15 minutes and then take it out and try to power it up. Youre chances of success are probably a little less than 50-50...but it has worked for me on several occasions. If when you power it up, you can access it....then start moving data to a new drive quickly becasue it won't last long and you may have to do this several times to get all of your data.

wds928

Ditto what Chrisp3 said. I've heard of this working. Good luck. I'll resend info if you need it.

dr bob

+1 on the freezer trick. I have a slew of disc/data recovery tools but they only work on mechanisms that are still running. I've been in your situation before and can directly relate to that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. Before you give up and toss the drive, I'd be happy to take a look and see what I can do for it. Generally, if the platters spin up and you can hear the heads clicking/hunting, we can get the data back from almost all of it with tools I have. Is this IDE interface? A full 200gb takes a day or two to recover and catalog. Was the drive pretty full?

karl ruiter

I'm not the hard drive expert you are looking for, but I spend a lot of time trouble shooting electronics so here's my 2 cents worth.
If you can buy another of the same USB drive assemblies you could swap the actual hard drive between the two. That would help if the problem was with the USB interface rather than the hard drive itself. Your test of putting the drive directly into the computer points towards a problem with the drive, but there may still be some chance this would help. Can you get any more detailed info out of XP? Perhaps if you go into the hardware manager you can find out if the USB is not responding or if the hard drive is not responding.

If it is the drive I think your real options are either to try to find a recovery service you can afford or just try to retrace your steps and reproduce your data from your last backup.

Some less real options: You could look to see if you can buy another drive that is exactly the same. If so you might have a shot at swapping the electronics between the two drives. I don't know if there are unit hardware specific adjustments that are stored in the electronics or not. If you really wanted to turn it into a hobby you could even swap other parts of the drive to try to get it to work. Obviously the heads etc would be pretty much impossible but the spindle motor and the head position motor might be do-able.

DK

If you are getting messages in XP, XP is seeing it, there is likely a good chance of recovery using forensic tools and software. If the drive is making repetitive clicking noises that is usually a physical failure in the drive which can usually be fixed and recovered, but the costs tend to get up there. If you are going to try a bunch of DIY projects, then realize that you could be doing more damage to the drive every time it is powered on, making it impossible to recover anything at all.

DK

RyanPerrella

Damn the irony!

Of all the 928 people to loose their electronic information, you are the last person i would want this to happen to! CRAP.

i never heard of the freezer trick but it seems to have made its way round the world, i will try and think of that if and when i ever have HD errors.

freezzz

Ditto again on the freezer trick, but don't try to boot from that hd. Set it up as a slave in another computer (that has adequate space to copy to) and it will/should show up as an additional drive. Setting it up this way you'll have more time to work with it before it generates an error.
Hope all goes well.

Bill Ball

If there is a repetitive "whir-click", it is most likely the read-write head hitting the edge of the platter. Do you know the manufacturer and model number of this drive? It would help to know if it is a single platter drive or not. It's probably not a single platter, so the remainder of what I say may not be too useful.

I used to work in computer hardware manufacturing. We used some drives in some of our products that were notorious for hanging on the edge of the platter. My quickie, short-term solution, if getting the drive to work was desired rather than just replacing it, was to smack the drive against the palm of my hand, knocking the read-write head off the edge of the platter. It worked about 75% of the time. After getting the information off, we would replace the drive. This wasn't an official repair process, but just something I did when people in-house brought me these things looking for a quick temporary fix.

Obviously, even if I am right, it would be far better to have a clean-house open up the drive and reposition the read-write head.

Tom928

I worked on hard drives for a few years, don't know that it makes me an expert though.
The ticking noise is the drive recalibrating and trying to seek to the first and last cylinders to initialize the head servo system. It very well maybe stuck or "parked" and can not move.

If the head has crashed or touched down on the surface of the platter, it can destroy the read capability of the head, contaminate the inside of the drive and can cause further damage everytime you power up the drive. This is the "IF" in what can be recovered. To much damage to the surface makes it impossible to read the contiguous cylinder, track and sector information that make up the data.

If the electronics have failed you can still corrupt your data as it is not being accessed using the OS partition or file system information. The read/write head may also be stuck in a write mode and cannot read therefore it can scramble everything on the drive.

With the amount of data and how valuable it is to so many, I highly recommend you send the drive to a recovery house where they can troubleshoot the drive and determine the condition of the head(s), platter(s) and see if they can read the data. The recovery houses can be pretty good and if the head has not crashed or touched down or the data is not corrupted, then they should be able to recover most of the information.

Good Luck,

Rick Carter

If you have to use a data recovery service I'll chip in a hundred bucks; I think others will do the same as the info is worth more than that (to me).

SwayBar

I'm in.