hard drive died :(

[Briansol]

my 500gb WD baracudda crapped out on me sometime last night. i woke up this morning to a 'non system disc' boot screen. figured maybe the boot sector crapped out or something.

bought a new 1tb today and got back set up.

all my files and music are on that other drive... would really like to be able to get to it. bios doesn't recognie it and neither does windows. it DOES spin up (and it sounds god-aweful, scrapping platters, etc)

Anyone have any ideas? I have a LOT of stuff on there (all my music recordings, pictures i'm not too worried about as i uploaded most of them to facebook or here anyway, HS site backups, and all my old downloaded emails (pop3 kills it form the server).

 

[phyregod]

Slave it? Sometimes you can get info off of a drive with a shit on boot sector if you slave it..


Short of that, try to go to a computer shop and have them burn whats left, we had a drive copier that would salvage a bunch of info off of dead drives.. most of it was corrupted, but you would get some back..

Then there are those data retrieval services that charge by the MB... but that can get damn expensive.

 

[Briansol]

the old drive, like all my drives, are sata. there's really no such thing as master/slave anymore on these things. they are all single cable board to drive connections. windows doesn't see it.



whats REALLY odd, is i suddenly have an A:\ drive... like i honestly have a floppy drive? lol don't know where the F that came from.

 

[Battle Pope]

I've heard putting the drive in a moisture-sealed bag and freezing it will let you get stuff off the drive while it's cold. Not sure.

 

[endlesszeal]

DONT TRY TO BOOT IT ANYMORE!! the more you do, the more you will lose and the more sectors will get f'ed up. the reason i say this is because if its a mechanical failure like the head, usually you get one shot at it coming alive long enough to recover files. and ive tried the freezer in the bag and it doesnt help at all.

id try installing a recovery software on a separate functioning drive. i used R-Studio and it was pretty successful. id make a image of the drive so that way you can dig through the image instead of the physical hard drive, thus preventing it from further damage.

if your drive isnt clicking or making weird noises and R-studio doesnt work, you can try giving spinrite ago. its takes a LONG ass time, but itll search all your sectors and try to move the data from damage parts to functioning ones.

best of luck.

 

[Briansol]

how do these tools help me if my bios and windows can't reconize that its even plugged in?

 

[endlesszeal]

Spinrite might detect since its low level system. Ive had it when my drive crashed and when posting, the drive didnt detect but after the OS loaded and i scanned it with R-Studio it picked it up.

Other than that, u can try plugging it into another machine because some chipsets will detect it and some dont like my nforce4 wasnt able to pick up of my crashed drives but an intel based system was able too.

 

[CRX-YEM]

B. and hard drive do not mix

 

[TurboMirage]

the freezer and bag trick do work, however the success rate is not high. i have had tons of drives through the freezer and only a few have worked, but a few is better than none.

spinrite will not work if bios doesnt see the drive. give that r-studio a shot if you can.

 

[DarkHand]

Back up your datas!1!!1!!

If the BIOS can't see it (as a secondary drive... don't try to boot off of it), you're hosed short of a low level recovery option... As was said that gets expensive quickly.

 

[klyph]

Buy an identical drive and swap the head and whatever else you need. I read an article of someone who got a drive that sounded like a rock crusher to work that way. It's only worth it if you REALLY need what's on the disk. Otherwise, start over.

harddriveswap.com?