Bringing back a "dead" hard drive

[stephenj5]

Sometime ago I had a power supply die in my computer. In trying to fix it, I ended up havign something happen to my hard drive that more or less killed it to some extent. When I had it in the computer still, when you turn the computer on the hard drive would spin up with no problem, but then it would start clicking, almost like the control arm was stuck, or hitting something. Either way, nothing can be read on the hard drive.

SO my question is, what could the problem be and what can i do to possibly fix it? I have been trying to find the same hard drive and swaping out the controller board to see if that might fix it, but I was also looking at possibly sending it away, but im not sure what options are out there for that. I want to attempt to get the information off the drive, but if it cant be done then its not a big deal.

Any advice and information is greatly apperciated.

[fishtoprecords]

You are supposed to go to your backup media, and get the information from it.

Perhaps a show suggestion is to talk about easy 'net based backups. There are a number of them.

If its dead, and won't come to life by being plugged into another computer, then you have to ask how important the data are.

There are professional data recovery companies, but they are pricey. $5K for a disk in some cases.

Because they are so expensive, and disks are so cheap, its a better idea (of course you can't do this after the fact) to buy a spare 500GB disk, and copy important files to it.

[blackacid]

You could try spinrite, http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

$90 but if the data is very important than it's worth it. It should be able to check out the drive and try to recover it.

Just a thought.

[mikec]

Some have had success with freezing a drive for a period and then plugging it in.

The thing to remember is IF you can get the drive to spit out data the amount of time and the number of chances to get the data decreases every time you try to read the disk. You might have only minutes to do a copy.

[slonkak]

Some have had success with freezing a drive for a period and then plugging it in.

The thing to remember is IF you can get the drive to spit out data the amount of time and the number of chances to get the data decreases every time you try to read the disk. You might have only minutes to do a copy.

This technique works rather well. Put the drive in the freezer overnight. Then plug it in and try to get your data. The clacking sound is usually the head smacking against the platters and when it's super cold the head doesn't move as freely, so it won't smack the platters as much.

But it's really about luck. I've had it not work for me at all, so I'd throw the drive back in the freezer and the next day someone else would try and it'd work.

[zeronome]

i've had the frozen data method work multiple times. just remember t o have your ducks in a row, and have the cables out and ready for the moment to plug it in. if you have an external usb to HDD adapter then use it and start copying like its your job. i would prioritize your data and get the most important stuff first. also i freezer bag my hdd so theres no moisture issues.

[fishtoprecords]

Anything is possible, I think this story described the most amazing recovery that I've heard of. No mention of how expensive it was.

Seems that with huge effort, amazing recoveries can occur. In this case it was recovering most of the data on a disk that literally fell from space when the Columbia Space shuttle exploded in 2003.

Quoting:

It was one of the most iconic and heart-stopping movie images of 2003: the Columbia Space Shuttle ignited, burning and crashing to earth in fragments.

Now, amazingly, data from a hard drive recovered from the fragments has been used to complete a physics experiment - CXV-2 - that took place on the doomed Shuttle mission.

http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5056