Hard Drive Failure! Recovery?
 

I tear through keyboards and mouses every few months but my hard drive here has been faithful to me for a little over 4 years now. I got the dreaded 'blue screen of death' a couple nights ago and have been dealing with all the fun that goes with that since.

Real long story, short: The drive crashed - nothing I tried could recover it - I bought a new drive - All is fine now, except I have to start all over (which isn't all bad, I am getting all the newest versions of everything.)

I've been reading up on some software that will help me in my data recovery efforts. Also, I've been looking at some data recovery services.

Do you guys have any advice?

before you go too far, try the old drive as a "slave" drive..you might get lucky and be able to get into it...

Ya, I was holding my breath as I put in into Ann's tower, but the drive is undetectable. I really wished that was the solution.

:Oh crap

is it old enough to have jumpers on it?

You could try the freezer trick... or putting the drive in upside down. I've managed to keep 2 drives alive long enough to get all the data off them by doing the above.

Not sure how much you are looking to spend, but I have used data recovery software made by ontrack to recover files on a windows based partition before. It works quite well.

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/d...very-software/

If you are not able to physically see the drive in your BIOS then most likely the drive will need to be sent to a data recovery service like

http://www.drivesavers.com/

Just keep in mind the 2nd solution will be very pricey. We had a raid 5 crash on us and it was around $18,000 for them to rebuild the raid and recover only some of the linux partitions which were on it. The entire directory structure was fuxored beyond belief so we had to independently place each file in the right place to get back on track.

Hope this helps.

Yes, everything in this tower was pretty good at the time back in early 2003 (2.6GHz CPU/120GB HD/2MB RAM). I haven't upgraded anything since, until now.

I've been playing around with jumper settings making hard drives and cd-rom drives as slaves/masters, but had no luck with this bad drive.

Some of these data recovery programs I've looked at will actually let me access a normally unaccessible drive, which sounds like just what I need. It looks like that is the road I need to go down now.

We used Magic Recovery Pro on a hard disk some time ago, worked great. If I'm right you can use the demo first to see if the program can actually recover it, before you buy.
http://www.tucows.com/preview/410327 $99

well that sucks ... good luck with it...

Thanks, at least I am back online and now my system is super fast, with all the latest versions of everything.

I have come to terms with losing over 4 years of bookmarks and everything else I had on there. It would be nice to get some data off of there but I'll still be working on that. Most of the most important data I have accumulated over the years is right between my ears anyways.

:thumbsup

If there is porn on the drive you will be alright. ;) Data recovery programs will make sure to recover files if they are porn! LOL!

I used this program when the same thing happened to me... was not detected as a slave, but was able to get data from it using the program.

http://www.runtime.org/

Good luck.

BTW... what drive and size? It wasn't a Seagate 300gb was it? :Oh crap

The old drive was a 120GB Seagate (Barracuda 7200.7). The new drive I just got (for $59) is a 160GB Seagate (Barracuda 7200.10).

Thanks for the advice, all.

http://www.wowmessageboards.com/foru.../2thumbsup.gif

To kill future problems and avoid having to build a "homestead" again - seriously suggest you invest in something like Acronis TrueImage. This will do a sector by sector mirror image of your primary drive (tho can be used on any drive) and write the mirror to a secondary drive (it's compressed well and nothing like the size of content on the primary). There is also an option (recommended) to write an Acronis boot CD which would obviously be needed if your drive goes again.

Instead of spending hours restoring, it takes around 20 mins to recover all progs, data and set the OS and registry back to the stage on the last Acronis mirror. Well worth it :thumbsup

I can highly recommend this little baby
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

It's saved me on numerous ocassions

does you see this drive as device in BIOS when you starting your pc?

Hi Turboface
 

Have you tried SpinRite ?

Good luck.

.

We've had a 95% recovery rate at recovering data from drives. As long as they spin up, we have the ability to recover the data. Hit us up if your interested.

Someone told me circuit city does this now for 60 dollars.

I feel for you. The same thing happened to me around Christmas time. It was fucking horrible! I managed to save a lot of important info photos, contacts, and entire websites.

I used this
http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/index.htm