failed PC Hard drive data recovery

Off-topic Chatter
21

Decide the value of the contents in terms of time and money. If the data isn’t easily replaceable and you want it;

Use a professional recovery service, costs the most, most reliable.

DIY I would start by buying a couple external cases and a good larger sized drive to put stuff on. Google the brand and specific model of the drive with a keyword like recovery or fail etc and see if others have had a similar problem. I did this with a Seagate drive and found that it was a common failure and Seagate would do the recovery free.

Consider buying one of the pro recovery products, I think I used Seagate recovery or rescue, something like that.

22

Okay, here’s what I do… mostly. Yeah, yeah, sometimes I fall behind.

Anything I have on a peecee that I don’t want to potentially evaporate into the æther in case the drive takes a dump, or Windows starts acting as the malware it really is, I stick onto an external usb drive, as my first line of defense.

After “cleaning” the data (renaming consistently, getting rid of crapfiles, etc.), I’ll dump the contents to a NAS.

You can have 2 wifi routers, one for everyday browsing and connecting your “in-house network” to wifi and the outside world, etc., and another for data-only use. NASes connected to that 2nd router, keep them and the router powered up only when you want to put/get something to that 2nd network. Saves wear’n’tear while you work the usb drives in the interim.

Don’t broadcast its SSID if you don’t want it advertised to every yayhoo in range, make it wired-access-only if you want, whatever. Disable wifi access. However secure you want to make it.

If you don’t mind spending the bux, mirror each NAS with another NAS, to be kept offsite. Every now and again, hook it up and sync up master/slave NASes. RAID is nice in case one drive in an array takes a dump, but if the whole NAS gets fried at once (lightning strike, fire, whatever), you’re SOL.

That’s also a good time to take inventory of everything you got: pix, movies, music, saved webpages, whatever. Just take a recursive directory listing into a text file at least, so you can search through it, even when nothing’s hooked up.

Basically, whatever system you want, whether basic or elaborate, is better’n just leaving all your crap on a peecee which’d croke and take alllllllll your precious goodies with it.

23

You can try buying a used hard drive exactly like the one you have off ebay or wherever you can find one. Find the sticker on the drive that has the model number. Do a search and find a used working drive. Take both drives apart and place your data disk into the new(used) drive. If the data is still there it should work like new. If it will not boot because of corrupt data, Plug it into a computer that will except 2 drives and pull the data off to the working computer drive. The working computer will see it as just a drive like plugging in a usb stick.
The data if not corrupt is still on the disk, you just need to read it. This is exactly how the pro’s recovery data when the drives destroyed (Not the disk) or quits working. When the drive motor or other parts fail the drive quits working but every single piece of data is still on the disk. Replace the motor or bad parts and the drive is perfectly fine. That’s the reason I suggested finding a used working drive exactly like yours and exchange the disk out. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this take it to a professional and let them switch the disk out. It should all still be there you just need to read it.
My 2 cents. :smiley:

24

Yep, but the freezer is faster.

Little Bro’s 2004 VAIO started crapping out on him some years back. It was the HD going and I put it in the freezer for 10, 15, 20 minutes and after a few attempts, got it working enough to snatch all of his family pictures off of it, which I burned to a CD-ROM off the same laptop.

He said I could have it, since he was buying another one.

Bought the HD off of Ebay and things were good for a few years, but it’s slow as molasses now and ready for the dumpster.

Chris

25

Hello, I have had such an HDD problem, Acronis® True Image ™ WD Edition helped me a lot, it is important to have a WD HDD connected to the motherboard, for Acronis® True Image ™ WD Edition to work properly. The HDD cloning is very fast with the program, the target HDD should be bigger than the source Hdd.
I had a 240GB HDD cloned to a new HDD in 10 minutes with the Acronis® True Image ™ WD Edition.

If the HDD gets too hot, ice spray can do a good job, but little use of the spray and permanently checking the HDD temperature with a laser thermometer will then cool the HDD above 50 degrees Celsius (122 ° F) with the ice spray, but only for a short time Spray intervals and spray only the metal sides, not the electronic components.

26

Well, if your hard drive is giving such a high noise it means it can die anytime. I advise you to take a complete backup of your valuable data to avoid data loss.

For ‘I am guessing the only way to get the data is to send the drive to someone and pony up some $’, it could be expensive for anyone as Data Recovery Company charge more for Services as compared to Data Recovery Software.

In your case for data recovery, I advise you to go for Stellar Data Recovery for Windows. It will help you in retrieving your lost or deleted data.

For your convenience, I can share a product link with you: https://www.stellarinfo.com/windows-data-recovery-professional.php

Go through this page and analyse it before purchasing the tool.

Hope it will also work for you.

Good Luck!

27

Repeating my previous advice, google the brand and exact model number with either fail or recover etc as a keyword and see what is suggested for your specific drive. Some respond to time in the freezer, some work with a board swap from a known good same model drive, some don’t as the boards encrypt data on the platters unique to some code on the each board. Given a choice recovery software from the drive manufacturer may work best.

Note, “most” recovery software will create something of a mess of files that will take some manual sorting out as fragments of deleted or moved files will be recovered along with “good” files and things may lose there folder hierarchy and be in one big folder.

28

Or you may throw a tweet at him on @powellstellar

You (we) may(be) even get a BLF discount :innocent:

29

Boot ubuntu into a usb drive and install a program called testdisk. It worked awesome for me even when windows couldnt see the drive at all. Good luck

30

Is there version of Testdisk for Mac OS? I didn’t found it…

31

Dear OP. I’m sorry your HD is failing. Many have been there and learned the hard way, myself included. It won’t help you now but here’s what I’d do.

Weekly: Back up discs via carbon copy cloner (CCC) using this:

That company is for Macs
Backup discs are stored at home in a media safe good to 110F. (Sorry, I don’t have a link for that. About $300.). Discs and photo negatives are stored in it.

Monthly: A separate set of discs are cloned and stored with a friend offsite.

I could loose a week of data, or possibly a month . I don’t backup online, and that’s my risk/comfort level.

Spinning disc hard drives are cheap but on the way out. I replace them with SSD’s now. More expensive but no moving parts, better performance, and lower failure rate. I replace all drives after three years. Best practice is two years. Link above sells SSD’s designed specifically for Macs and they have worked well for me over the years. No SSD failure to date.

Yes, it is time consuming and costly to do all this, but probably cheaper and less timely than professional crash recovery. I sleep pretty good now, often dreaming of superhuman flashlights. I love my new hobby.

32

Linux time…
I use an old POS dual core Laptop w/ 2 gigs ram and 128GB Hd to run my 3D printer, and run my pi-hole internet filter, there are uses for older hardware w/ linux

mechanical failure on drives mean the hardware is bad…the OS getting fried and no longer booting means it can easily be recovered with a live cd such as” ultimate boot cd”:http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ or hirens boot cd burned to a USB drive
I have done that many times…but when the click o’ death is there…only way to restore is get another harddrive of similar build…move the platters over and hope it can read…

33

Ideally, I try to only have “expendable” stuff on any drives. Anything important or that I just don’t want to have to recreate goes offline. Preferably on dual drives, but my offline drives only get activated when I want to put something on or take something off, so they get little use.

34

an end user has exactly 0% chance of pulling this off.
i do this sort of work.
those platters must have their relative positions maintained exactly.
i have special tools to do this and many tools are brand and series specific.
taking the cover off can only make it worse.
and running anything at all other than a logical recovery tool on the drive is a waste of precious operating time.
damaged drives are often degrading as they run so its a race against time.
the only self help here is if the data is not worth professional recovery and you want a last ditch effort to get something.
use a good logical recovery software like getdataback,photorec,isobuster,ect.
if by chance it does see the folder structure recover the most important first.
work back to the least important.
realize the drive may quit at any time.