Hard drive data and/or image recovery

[1859Dame]

Hi ALL

Can anyone in this forum recommend where to go for data recovery for a hard drive?

Mine failed to boot; pulled it and hooked the HD to my laptop via a sata/UBS to ata external power setup (leant from my neighbor). The power is ok within the HD (which was determined before pulling from the pc tower) yet confirmed the "driver" is not working/recognized.

Would love a referral for data recovery (sigh) and IF possible, an image to then transfer to a new HD to save the headache of installing from scratch.

THANK YOU for any ideas beyond the big box computer stores!

Cheers.

[sigh]

Hi ALL

Can anyone in this forum recommend where to go for data recovery for a hard drive?

Mine failed to boot; pulled it and hooked the HD to my laptop via a sata/UBS to ata external power setup (leant from my neighbor). The power is ok within the HD (which was determined before pulling from the pc tower) yet confirmed the "driver" is not working/recognized.

Would love a referral for data recovery (sigh) and IF possible, an image to then transfer to a new HD to save the headache of installing from scratch.

THANK YOU for any ideas beyond the big box computer stores!

Cheers.

what do you mean by the "driver" is not working? you're running windows?

you could try booting into a linux live distro via CD/DVD to see if the drive is reachable. from there it's relatively easy to copy the data to a secondary drive.

you shouldn't need a real deal data recovery service unless the drive itself is physically damaged.

HTH

[LUCas]

As asked below, what do you mean by "confirmed the "driver" is not working/recognized."? A driver is a piece of software that resides on your computer and allows your OS to access hardware. If you don't have the correct driver installed on the laptop for taht external SATA connection and/or the hard drive itself, you'll need to download those and install them on the laptop.

As far as data recovery, unless you had some really expensive data on there (and if you did without backing it up, shame on you) I wouldn't bother. Last I checked on pricing for recovering data from a non-working hard drive it was a couple grand.

[ArcticSplash]

I'm giving up and switching to SSDs, starting with my work computer.

Already burning the DVD to wipe my machine and start over as we speak.


The last straw for me was a Fiberchannel drive in my desktop went out on me. After all that time and expense getting a loopback adapter on eBay and a decent PCI fiber card... one of my IBM drives goes out on me after 4 years and now I have to fix it and reload hours and hours and hours of tapes to get everything back.

[Hal]

Hi ALL

Can anyone in this forum recommend where to go for data recovery for a hard drive?

Your fridge.

1) Pull the drive, put it in a ziplock bag.
2) Beg, borrow find, one of those silica gel anti-moisture packs to put in the bag.
3) Put the drive in the fridge, in a bag. Dry ice in a styrofoam cooler is even better.

This does 2 things.
Electronics run better cold, drives that lock up hot may run when cold.
Loose solder joints shrink, sometimes just-enough to make contact.
Wait about 2 hours for the drive to cool down.

4) During that 2 hours, setup a drive to hold the recovered data
- beg or borrow a high capacity external hard drive (cd's, DVD's and web backups will be too slow)

5) pull the drive from the fridge.
Open the ziplock.
Plug in the cables.
Copy the data.


Hal

[loveisnoise]

Hal, how many people do you hurt each day from googling while working in your legal practice?

PLEASE disregard Hal's google nonsense. Does it work sometimes? Yes-but not in the steps he provided, and the risks far outweigh the possible benefits. And if this process is used, you run a very possible risk of causing irreparable damage.

Your fridge.

1) Pull the drive, put it in a ziplock bag.
2) Beg, borrow find, one of those silica gel anti-moisture packs to put in the bag.
3) Put the drive in the fridge, in a bag. Dry ice in a styrofoam cooler is even better.

This does 2 things.
Electronics run better cold, drives that lock up hot may run when cold.
Loose solder joints shrink, sometimes just-enough to make contact.
Wait about 2 hours for the drive to cool down.

4) During that 2 hours, setup a drive to hold the recovered data
- beg or borrow a high capacity external hard drive (cd's, DVD's and web backups will be too slow)

5) pull the drive from the fridge.
Open the ziplock.
Plug in the cables.
Copy the data.


Hal

[Sailaway]

I have done HDD recovery at varying times personally and professionally, including sector-by-sector rebuilds that took hundreds of hours. The nature of your failure will determine what can be done, if anything, and how much it costs. However, one cheap solution I can recommend, if you can locate an identical drive and revision, is to replace the controller board on the drive. If the failure was on the controller board then most of the data may be recoverable. I say "most" because every drive has bad physical sectors and the on-board logic maintains a replacement list which differs from drive to drive.

[1859Dame]

Mea culpa. Driver vs drive, sometimes all I want to be is a passenger!

Update. The hd has failed and under warranty. The data, as before, is the elusive question as to whether it can it be saved? It is en route to the Midwest for status. IF not prohibitive, will have an image OR data retrieval/backup made. Will let you know of the outcome.

Thank you for those who sent PM's. Local sources where prohibitive $ - and I do not trust the big box "claims" to their expertise (sending out to a 3rd party).

BACK UP YOUR HD FOLKS! I did so religiously up till mid-2011 and now...UGH!!

[LUCas]

I'm giving up and switching to SSDs, starting with my work computer.

Already burning the DVD to wipe my machine and start over as we speak.


The last straw for me was a Fiberchannel drive in my desktop went out on me. After all that time and expense getting a loopback adapter on eBay and a decent PCI fiber card... one of my IBM drives goes out on me after 4 years and now I have to fix it and reload hours and hours and hours of tapes to get everything back.

RAID + backups. SSDs fail, too.