Hard Drive recovery?

[YAN-3]

guys i just lost all my crap I had on my external hard drive. all my movies, photos and music. anybody know of a place were data can be recovered from an external HDD? anyone?

[nando]

HD recovery is very expensive, so prepare to break out the wallet if you want to go that way..

if the drive died, you can try an old trick: put it in the freezer for a couple hours, and then try to get your data off the drive. you might have to repeat that a few times to get everything. I know it sounds crazy but it actually does work sometimes..

also, why are you using an external HDD with no backup? they're subjected to shocks and other things that a normal HDD doesn't get exposed to, and those are already pretty fragile. DVD burners are cheap as hell these days..

[nkell09]

Is the drive USB? I would try taking it out of the external enclosure and putting it in as a secondary drive on another machine. (I'm guessing its probably an IDE hookup). That would rule out issues with the external interface.

My roommate has had good success with low-level utilities on trashed drives. See if you can find some recommended recovery software and try to get it from the torrents.

If it doesn't power up, the platters will make nice windchimes.

[benDASHDASH]

Be sure to bag it before freezing it.

[equate975]

If it dosnt make an incessent clicking sound, you can try to revivie it yourself.

1. Get another HD just like it
2. Goto the bath room, close the door, and run a hot shower.
3. Let the room heat up
4. Pull apart both hard drives
5. Replace the bad hard drives board with the new hard drives board
6. DONT TOUCH THE F*&#ING PLATTERS

[Ryan Stewart]

define "lost."

It could be something as simple as the controller or the operator.

[chuckybob]

start-> run-> "cmd" -> [enter]

chkdsk [drive letter] /r

[YAN-3]

when i plug it in, it does the initial crap but when attempting to access the actual data on it just keeps searching and searching. anycompanies to look up or is this like a done deal?

I learned a lesson the hard way. Im buying a DVD burner and everything is going to be backed up.

[XR5Resurrection]

I tinkered with his harddrive. I tried a few utilities, chkdsk, etc no luck. Interface is fine as now I put in another HDD and it's fine. The old HDD, one or more of the platters or something with it are bad, has a nasty vibration and you can hear the drivemotor slow down over time then the drive motor overheats, etc. I didn't try any 'tricks' in case he wanted to take it somewhere to professionally recover the data.

Lesson learned here Voz! Backup your backup 8) DVD DL burners are dirt cheap these days!

[RobertK]

You may be stuck using a professional data recovery service. It all depends on how valuable the data is to you.

[92 mtechnic cabrio]

You may be stuck using a professional data recovery service. It all depends on how valuable the data is to you.

Yeah we're talkin prices that start at $5000

[mspiegle]

I would get another harddrive, install windows on it, make it the primary, then put your old harddrive in the computer as a secondary. Get yourself a copy of Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro. I saved MANY clients' data with this software.

Once you have tried EVERYTHING, then you can start doing strange things to the harddrive. I once saved a customer's data on a "hopeless" harddrive by turning a can of pressurized air up-side-down and freezing the circuit board on it.... anything is possible....

[mspiegle]

Also, RAID1 is cheap insurance against harddrive failures but it won't protect you against yourself (if you accidently deleted something). All it takes is a 2nd harddrive and RAID software or a controller card capable of RAID.