Hard drive recovery/repair

Samson

My slave drive has died on me, it's a Quantum Fireball 40GB.
Can anyone recommend someone who could either bring it back to life or recover what's on it?
I suspect the problem is quite serious as it's making a "clunking" sound when powered up, BIOS is not seeing it.

Please, no preaching about backing up, I already know how lazy I am.

Bosco

Try giving the drive a bang (don't hit it too hard though) just as the computer is powering up (and no this is not a joke). 'Clunking' sounds are sometimes a result of the drive's motor not spinning up properly, and giving it a bang just before the BIOS tries to detect it can get the drive working properly (though only until you power it off). If you get it to spin up properly use the opportunity to copy your valuable data onto another drive.

If no amount of banging works then I'm sorry to say that your drive is most likely a lost cause.

Bosco

elexes

unless ur willing to pay a serious ammount of cash your drive's info will never be seen again

the hdd u have was a botched hd i have 4 of them in work mostly from gateways/fujitsu computers they were sent out with a fault and were never replaced .

Samson

Originally posted by elexes
unless ur willing to pay a serious amount of cash your drive's info will never be seen again

What kind of cost are we talking about?

SouperComputer

could be from 250e to 1500 or more.

there seems to be lot of places in the states, have a google, most of the places have gold boards, clean rooms and spare chassis to get yoru data back.

irishgeo

yeah bang it off the wall that will break the motor and let the drive spin right or put in the freezer overnight and then put into the computer.Dont let the drive warm up as it will stop working again.

I have seem the wall trick work on a hard drive at work.


these might not work and could damage your hard drive but since its working anyway.

dj_deevey

i had a similar problem a few weeks ago, basically a dodgy drive, and seagate told me that if i mailed it back they'd replace it .. i also looked into some repair programs for disks and guys that would do backup (theres a few in ireland) but the prices were crazy (charge per MB and i was getting quotes for my 80 gig of up to 3000 euro !) and no garuntees that they can get back anything !,

The clunking noise is (so i was told by seagate) the heads trying to access a bad boot sector, that is, information that is embedded on the drive from new, that tells the computer that "this is a harddrive", hence the reason it doesnt show up in bios, this info cant be re written normally!

(info above was given to me by seagate)

If its a clicky clunky noise but the drive still shows up AND its FAT32 (not NTFS) you could try spinrite 5, i had a prob with a laptop in the office that was making nasty noise, and only booting occasionally, and it solved the prob.

tapping the drive on booting the machine sometimes works, because the head may skip some (less) essential files on booting, while still allowing the MB to read it as a "hard drive", (seagate told me this too) mind you you'll probably find that some files are still inaccessible (they may only be tiny fragments, but i have tried formatting a drive like this and it hung and started clicking at 73 %) but if you can get this far, you should be able to get most of your essentials.

anyway i didnt get a new drive from seagate and didnt pay for recovery, basically if someone else can recover data they have access to all my info for the past year and half, and id prefer to lose it than have someone else snooping round, no matter who they are,

anyways... moral of the story... ? Iv become an expert in backing up !

P.S. 80 gig seagate barracuda, 5 gigs free.... ouch!

Feel free to correct any of the info above....

laters ,

steve

irishgeo

these seem pretty reasonable and its works over the net and you do need another live dive to put the recovered information onwww.totalrecall.net

Bosco

I just thought I'd clarify my advice,seeing as there are obviously a mess of different clunking noises a drive can make.

You'll know if the platter hasn't started to spin properly if the drive doesn't make it's usual humming noise on power up, but instead makes some kind of rythmic clicking or whirring. A (mild) impact to the drive may possibly help it to start spining. I know of no other case in which an impact to a drive will make things any better, though no doubt some exist. Banging your drive off a wall is not generally advisable

If the drive works for a short time and then ceases to work, but works again briefly the next day, then the problem may be heat related. I'm not sure if putting a drive in the freezer is good for it though, if only because it will warm up very quickly and unevenly when you plug it in.

All that said though, if you can't afford to have the data recovered professionally and the drive's definately got something seriously wrong with it, whats the harm in a little experimentation?

irishgeo

i am only going to by what i was told at work where i am training to be a network technicain. My boss said that the last resort would be to bang it off the wall or put it in the freezer. I have actually seem him do and it worked and resulsted lots of material that was not backed up coming back completely sound. He said the motor that spins the drive had broken and was stuck so to unloosen it either bang it off the wall or put it in the freezer.

So if you dont like what i am saying by all means pay for data recovery when all they might do is bang it off the wall.


I didnt put down anybody else advice so why put down mine espically after i seen it work.

Bosco

I stand corrected, freeze away.

Standard Toaster

Turning the drive upside-down (there really is no up/down for a hdd) might help.

My old WD hdd would do make this knocking sound unless I flipped her over.

vibe666

the freezer trick works quite a lot, I've used it myself on more than one occasion, and depending on the condition of the drive you might get a good portion of the data back off it.

make sure you stick it in a sealed bag first though, you don't want ice crystals forming on anything important do you?

the knocking trick is also quite useful some of the time, but I wouldn't reccomend doing it with anything other than the palm of your hand, and not too hard either. it might be worth just moving the drive around a bit first while it's spinning up, just to see if that will do it. better to be using too little force than too much if you know what i mean.

if you can even get the drive to be recognised by the bios it would be a start, and as has already been mentioned spinrite is about the best thing to get it up and running after that.

the guy who wrote it has probably the best understanding of how HD's work of anyone I have ever heard of. btw, to save you looking, it's at www.grc.com

good luck.

C@non

http://www.bitmart.net/data-recovery-software/data-recovery-software.shtml

http://www.softwareshelf.com/products/display_homeuser.asp?p=11


one of these 2 do the job, we got a broken down HD`s files back, they where really important