Data Recovery

[Jimmy Macintosh]

This is just a desperate cry for possible help...

My hard drive failed the other day, of course no imminent warning. Been a while since I bothered to back it up, the last back up took so many hours and it seemed to just try and mirror my harddrive including all of the empty space so 14 CD's later and still no where near completion I stopped it.
Anyway, I've put the hard drive in for data recovery at Best Buy (USA) Now if they're unsuccessful what are my options in getting anything more off the hard drive? Mostly I'm after about 1-2 Gb of photos and documents from a 160Gb drive.
I understand if those sectors are damaged that there is no hope. But would a more specialist place be able to do a more significant job than Best Buy?

[Mac the Knife]

If Best Buy's PFY hasn't messed it up, yes.

Quite expensive

Many data recovery services findable on Google.

Bummer :(

[BOFH]

Tsk tsk.

It depends on what failed. If you are lucky, it's an MBR/partition table problem. If you are less lucky, it's drive electronics. It gets ugly after that.

The usual quotes start at around 800GBP here. Some places operate on a no win/no fee basis. Word of mouth is best, I suggest looking through some of the storage-related newsgroups (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage is a good start).

I hope it works out, and please invest the time and the minuscule amount of money to back up your new drive. If it's any consolation, it's happened to most of us.

BOFH

[pawea]

you could try ontrack data recovery software has worked great for me with many a damaged disk.

[bettyharven]

You could try to mount it as a slave drive and see whether you could access the inner data.
If you still cannot reach the inner data, you should try a free hard drive recovery tool that has helped me recover the inaccessible data from a hard drive (http://www.transfer-iphone-recovery.com/recover-lost-data-from-hard-drive.html). It is efficient and easy to handle.

See more at www.transfer-iphone-recovery.com (http://www.transfer-iphone-recovery.com/)

[Milo Minderbinder]

It all depends on what was wrong with it
and also on what Best Buy do with it - handing the machine to them was night the brightest thing to do. As a rule companies like that are not data recovery specialists: my guess is you'll get the machine back with a new hard drive, or the old one overwritten and the data lost.

What you also have to remember is that if there is a hardware fault on the drive, then recovery attempts can make the situation worse.
If the problem was simply a software issue, then theres quite a lot you can do yourself. Apart from simply running CHKDSK, or the drive manufacturers repair utilities there are a couple of useful data recovery tools: Recuva and GetDataBack. Both are easy to use though time-consuming.

Now the big question is, what are the symptoms. A "crash" can mean a lot of different things. What actually happened?

[worrab]

A hard drive crash without warning is sometimes better than one with a warning. If the surface is failing in some way, you'll often hear a grating noise from the head as it repeatedly resets itself trying to find the data. If it's been silent, and the computer won't boot then hopefully it's simply a soft error that (if you're using Windoze) CHKDSK will find and fix (as others have said). There are a number of ways of running CHKDSK from a computer that won't boot, but the easiest is probably booting from the original installation CD that you may have had. If you don't have one, then my next step would be to install it as a slave in another machine (as someone else said!).
The next two really are for the cases when nothing can be done:
If it's genuinely stuffed and the head is clattering around, you could try the remedy of desparation and pop the drive in a sealed polythene bag in the fridge. Give it an hour or two to cool down and then install it as fast as possible (eg connect the cables only and get to work. You can sometimes get five or ten minutes to grab the data.
Finally, check that the drive is rotating. Drives usually hum/vibrate slightly when they're spinning. Sometimes the grease on the spindle goes hard and the disc won't spin-up. (This usually only occurs when the machine's been off for some time.) I have been fortunate in the past to use a fast wrist spin and get one to rotate again so that I could grab the data off it.
Good Luck!

[Milo Minderbinder]

"Sometimes the grease on the spindle goes hard and the disc won't spin-up"

They're air bearings aren't they?

[Mac the Knife]

They're mostly fluid-dynamic bearings now (ball-bearings in the past)

Mac

:ouch: