data recovery from a busted HDD

[PruritusAni]

Hey gang,

 

as some of you might know I'm building mom a new computer, as her old one perished not long ago. As the hardware is falling neatly into place and the major tests (memtest, prime95 24hrs etc) have been passed she let me know she wanted her data from her old hard drive. This would normally be easy to do as I have an external enclosure that'll fit an old IDE hdd. However things are not that easy as neither windows nor spinrite see the drive. It makes some clicking noises for a little while as it's trying to spin up or something, but ultimately it just gives up and refuses to show up for a whole night of spinrite. Mom's pretty fond of her data, and I'm still not giving up on her hard drive. Does anyone know of any good ways to recover some (or all) of her data?

[feetfats]

Hey gang,

 

as some of you might know I'm building mom a new computer, as her old one perished not long ago. As the hardware is falling neatly into place and the major tests (memtest, prime95 24hrs etc) have been passed she let me know she wanted her data from her old hard drive. This would normally be easy to do as I have an external enclosure that'll fit an old IDE hdd. However things are not that easy as neither windows nor spinrite see the drive. It makes some clicking noises for a little while as it's trying to spin up or something, but ultimately it just gives up and refuses to show up for a whole night of spinrite. Mom's pretty fond of her data, and I'm still not giving up on her hard drive. Does anyone know of any good ways to recover some (or all) of her data?

 

 

 

Mom needs to learn to back up her important data

[redtigerdragon]

Hey gang,

 

as some of you might know I'm building mom a new computer, as her old one perished not long ago. As the hardware is falling neatly into place and the major tests (memtest, prime95 24hrs etc) have been passed she let me know she wanted her data from her old hard drive. This would normally be easy to do as I have an external enclosure that'll fit an old IDE hdd. However things are not that easy as neither windows nor spinrite see the drive. It makes some clicking noises for a little while as it's trying to spin up or something, but ultimately it just gives up and refuses to show up for a whole night of spinrite. Mom's pretty fond of her data, and I'm still not giving up on her hard drive. Does anyone know of any good ways to recover some (or all) of her data?

 

You can try the freezer trick. Put it in the freezer (in a bag, of course) for about 24hrs, then try it again. Sometimes it works, sometime it doesn't. Other than that you'd have to send it to a company that would take the drive apart to get the data, and that aint cheap.

[ilya_hhjj]

You should try this before the freezer thing as you COULD (though unlikely) make your situation worse with the freezer

 

1. Put the hdd in the ide enclosure, without powering up the drive.

2. Boot into any generic Linux hdd recovery distro.

3. Make sure the drive is upside down. (clicking from my experience is a read head issue, gravity can sometimes help)

4. Power up and mount the hdd in Linux.

5. Try to recover data ASAP.

 

The freezer should be an absolute no cost last resort, it might get your moving parts to "snap" back into place due to the "freezing and defrosting," but keep in mind the hdd platter is not sealed off from condensation, which could damage your data beyond repair.

[PruritusAni]

Thanks all for the speedy replies. Here's the progress so far:

 

Connected the drive directly to the mobo via an IDE cable and powered it. The computer is then turned on; it makes the same noises over and over again, when it stops, the computer actually goes on past the start up screen or into bios, where it doesn't see it. I tried this with various orientations of the hard drive, to try and gravity assist the process. This hasn't done much, other than delay my start up times while the noises mock me.

 

Tried GetDataBack and NortonGhost but they didn't see the drive at all. Needless to say I could recover data this way.

 

Tried Spinrite again with the drive hooked up to the mobo, and it keeps telling me "error reading partition table drive 00 sector 0BIOS reported 0 sectors/track, as summing 63!". A new one of these pops up after each session of noises from the HDD. This happens 3 times, then SpinRite starts up after some other error. Once in SpinRite we spend some serious time discovering system's mass storage devices while series of noises run their course. SpinRite then proceeds to tell me it enabled SMART on my main HDD and on the next screen (which is very red and has chain link Xs in the background) it tells me of a division overflow error, occurring "at 6DB1 from which SpinRite CANNOT recover. The system has been halted." The following is also displayed:

eax: 00000000 esi: CFEF0000

ebx: 00000100 edi: 001081A9

ecx: 00000000 ebp: 000F3F7C

edx: 00000000 esp: 00003F5E

 

ds: 1063 es: 6FE8 fs: 5000

gs: 067A ss: 33F2 fl: 0246

From here the only option was a restart.

 

Right now the drive is in the freezer.