Hey guys/gals,
I need someone that knows how to recover data from a damaged hard drive. I have a 20gb Seagate hard drive that has a lot of data on it that I need back. I've had a guy take a look at it already and he said that the the first few sectors of the drive are damaged... or something like that... and the drive needs to be physically disassembled in order to retrieve the data... apparently.

If you are able to do this, or know of someone who is, please PM me ASAP.

Thanks!

 

You can try running Spinrite first before doing the disassembling thing which costs $$$$-$$$$$ (actual figures).

thewird

 

yea to disassemble you have to have a dust free/wind free room and i think the guy wanted to charge me 1500 to do it.

 

SpinRite is garbage. Steve Gibson is a douchebag.

I may be able to recover the drive without disassembly.

What steps did the previous guy go through in a recovery attempt?

Generally a few bad sectors won't pose much of a problem for me. However if the drive has completely crashed and won't even spin up, then the only choice is sending it out for recovery.

 

I would suggest slaving it with another hard drive and hopefully windows will see it and you can pull off what you need and burn it to a cd. Other option, get an old old pc and use an old windows version (95), slave the bad drive and boot the thing up with a windows recovery floppy and you will likely be able to access data using dos, that's if you ever learned dos.

 

OK, if you are goin to try and recover it yourself, the first thing to do is STOP TRYING immediately and clone the disk.

Your best bet for cloning is to use an old version of Ghost. Ghost 2003, or Ghost 5. Get another disk and connect it to the secondary IDE controller as a master. Connect your bad disk to the primary IDE controller as a master. Disconnect all other IDE devices and then boot with a clean DOS, Windows 95 or Wiin98 boot disk. Run ghost with the -FRO switch and then attempt to clone from the bad to the good. It may take HOURS, ALL NIGHT or SEVERAL DAYS. In 99% of cases, this will get your data over to the new disk and you can then copy it somewhere safe.

If that fails, then there are other self-recovery steps that can be taken but they require a certain skill. I've opened drives and repaired them before but only if professional data recovery is not an option. If it's just bad sectors, then recovery should be under $2000.

 

I might be in a similar boat. At christmas I was transferring video files onto my new iPod and the next morning when I go to turn on the computer nothing happened. Mouse wouldn't run, keyboard was a no go,and no signal to the monitor, however the pc turned on and lit up.

I opened it up and saw an inch thick of dust on the fan over the cpu, but I don't knwo much about computers to figure out whatmay or may not be broken.

I hope it's not the hard drive from the costs I'm seeing here. I have way to many files from school and stuff I've collected to lose.

 

It's a bit late now, but to avoid this you just need to BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.

Get a DVD burner and a stack of DVDRWs. Both Nero and Roxio come with backup utilities. Run a backup every week, or more often if you can't afford to lose stuff. You don't need to backup your whole computer, just you data.

If you are insane like me, use a tape backup. I use a 12/24 Gig IBM DAT drive to backup my most critical stuff. A small backup of most often changed data happens every night and just appends the previous night's data on the tape. A full backup happens every Sunday morning and then I bring the tape to the office on Monday to keep it offsite. Stuff like movies and all the really big files that never change just get burned to DVD/CDs.

 

I use this program called SyncBackSE which syncs my entire laptop hard drive every night with an external I have always on. It works similar to Rsync for linux which is great.

thewird

 

i use Ontrack easy recovery professional. It does raw level file reads if you have to get that dirty. I accidentally formatted my back up drive one day and the software worked.

Just google "Ontrack" and then use your imagination to get it for free :P

 

Lol I lost some data once in 1982 and have been backing up ever since!

For me, everything that was old is now digital..old snapshots, old home videos, all of my music and movies...plus all of my correspondence for the last 20 years.

As Aaron recommends, you MUST do backups. Apart from the onsite backups I employ on my home network, I also went out to Costco and got a couple of those 250GB passport drives. The nice thing about them is that they fit into a safe-deposit box at the bank, which is where they are sitting.

With disk being so cheap these days, it boggles my mind that people would not have a backup copy of their stuff.

Sorry I can't help with your data recovery. I never have, nor ever expect to, learn how to do it.

 

i know bad sectors in the harddrive are unrecoverable, but if you take it to a computer shop and they SHOULD be able to recover the rest of the data, could cost a bit though.

 

the best method for backup/reliability these days is some sort of RAID setup, very easy these days with SATA.

anyway, is the disk able to spin up at all?
if it is, just do a format of the disk so that bad sectors are detected and the disk can be accessed again (usually). the files are not actually deleted, you just need a good software utility that can extract files from a formatted disc, or send it away from someone to do it.

but if the drive doesn't spin up, it gets expensive quickly.

 

For reliability for online storage, then RAID is the best choice. RAID5 will give you the best compromise between speed and disk space usage but requires 3 or more disks.

One thing to watch out for is that many so-called consumer grade "RAID" controllers suck and will not allow you to regenerate an array if a disk fails. This is especially true if it is a mirrored volume. Make sure that any RAID controller you use says it specifically supports "regeneration" or makes reference to the fact that you can swap out a bad disk.

However a RAID array is of limited backup value. Proper backups need to be taken off site and keep multiple copies of your data on different physical media.

Formatting is a very dangerous thing to do at this point. A quick format will only erase the FAT and mean that files can generally be recovered but a quick format will also not check for bad sectors. It's also a bad idea to work on the disk you are trying to save. Instead, make a clone and work off the clone. Most of the time just the act of cloning will get the data onto a readable disk.

Generally, but not always. I've fixed a number disks by simply swapping out the board. I keep the board from every HD that fails and have them filed according to model number and firmware version. Often a disk that doesn't spin can be easily revived. In two cases I've opened up the disk and resoldered a broken wire.

 

I just keep everything important in "my documents" and back up regularly. You could slave a second drive and have the system back up itself all the time, chances of 2 drives crashing is not terribly likely. However a virus could kill both....

 

well it's not expensive if you know what you are doing

and i only mentioned formatting because sometimes that may be the only way to get a disc to be accessed, especially if the tables are corrupt.
cloning the disc is a preferred first option, agreed.

 

gl in getting your data. I was working as a co op student at an apple service depot and a customer came in with her laptop and said it doesn't work anymore... we figured out it was the hdd and it had crashed and quoted her how much it would cost to send the hdd out to a 3rd party to get the data back and she was cool with it.... $4699 to get wedding pictures back... lol.

 

Yeah, but that's Apple. Most of the "Genius" techs at Apple stores wouldn't know an eSATA port from a Token Ring concentrator.

 

Are you taking about a Token Ring MAU Aaron?

I've had some success with a program called HDD Regenerator 1.5...think I snagged it off emule...

 

MAU, Concentrator, whatever you want to call it. Years ago I got into the habit of calling it a "Concentrator" and I've been unable to break the habit even though it's wrong.