Data recovery from a failed hard drive. Any hope?

TheBoyConor

I have a 500Gb drive in my PC that is redundant since I installed my SSD. I could format and partition that into two 250Gb drives and then image the problem drive onto one partition and put the working clone for recover into the other partition.

I think a hurdle will be getting the problem drive to mount or be recognized by the PC without freezing up. Several recover tools like recuva and anyrecover that I've tried so far just freeze up. I'll try a few methods to mount the drive.

arleitiss

TheBoyConor wrote: »

I have a 500Gb drive in my PC that is redundant since I installed my SSD. I could format and partition that into two 250Gb drives and then image the problem drive onto one partition and put the working clone for recover into the other partition.

I think a hurdle will be getting the problem drive to mount or be recognized by the PC without freezing up. Several recover tools like recuva and anyrecover that I've tried so far just freeze up. I'll try a few methods to mount the drive.

I had similar issue before as well.
I got cheap 15 euro drive docker/cloner from amazon and cloned entire damaged drive onto blank hard drive as those things don't really care if data is readable or not.

I know you want to clone it to partition, just putting that as an option out there.

TheBoyConor

I have a SATA external HDD enclosure that I use as a dock. it connects to PC through USB. If I cannot clone or mount through that I might give it a try by connecting to the internal SATA sockets.

Failing that I might try one of those standalone clone machines. A cheap one got off of ebay or amazon would do me. Could you recommend one? More importantly, did it work when you tried it?

Ten Pin

Puppy Linux (and other versions of Linux) can boot off a USB flash drive independently of the laptop hard drive. Then see if anything shows up on the 'faulty' drive.


http://puppylinux.com/

my3cents

Try the device connected to whatever you like it probably won't make any difference. If its recognised at start and you've nothing to loose then I'd heat the **** out of it with a hair drier then plug it in with some software ready running that will do a sector by sector clone.

The hair drier might get it going (long time since I've done that but it does work sometimes) long enough to get the cloning started and the sector by sector cloning shouldn't have the heads moving too much which might also help. If the hair drier trick is working then keep it played on the drive to keep it good and hot (you should still be able to hold it) .

Johnboy1951

TheBoyConor wrote: »

I have a 500Gb drive in my PC that is redundant since I installed my SSD. I could format and partition that into two 250Gb drives and then image the problem drive onto one partition and put the working clone for recover into the other partition.

I think a hurdle will be getting the problem drive to mount or be recognized by the PC without freezing up. Several recover tools like recuva and anyrecover that I've tried so far just freeze up. I'll try a few methods to mount the drive.

You seem to misunderstand what a clone and bit by bit copy is.

Forget about partitions or anything else on the clone target drive.
You need to make a duplicate of the problem drive which means ALL of it, including partition structure etc etc.

Tiy easiest method would be using a live Linux running from USB and then use the 'dd' command to read the problem drive and write what it reads to the target clone drive.

If that succeeds then you have a chance to recover data from the clone.

TheBoyConor

Tried many of the above but nothing worked. Turns out the lady has a lot of the stuff actually backed up as it turns out.

So I opened it up while running and rammed my screwdriver onto the platter. Sparks flew and everything. lols