data recovery

[Rine]

My laptop's harddrive died a sudden death on Thursday. I came home, opened it up and it went to the Welcome screen and we were getting along just fine. (I have Windows XP, BTW)

Then I blue screened. The first blue screen I've had in a long, long, loooong time. It was a code x000000F4. Hm, never seen that one before. So I shut it down and let it sit for a moment, then turned it back on. No booting. PBR 2 failed?

Later on, I ran a diagnostics test via F12 and NO DRIVE DETECTED? Missing boot.ini file?

Put in Windows XP CD and attempted repair. The volume has an unrecoverable error?

I took the sorry laptop to the repair shop and they said it was D.O.A. and gave me a new harddrive. They said no data could be recovered from the old harddrive.

Please, someone...is there any hope for my old harddrive? I last made backups a year ago (I know, bad me) so I'm missing a year (nearly to the date, lol) of school work and writings.

How can I recover this data? They said it failed because it was old. Please, please...give me hope!

[Eric the Grey]

There are companies that specialize on recovering information from drives that have died, but from what I've heard, they charge a lot of money.

If the thing won't spin up, then it is unlikely you'll be able to do anything with it.

If it does operate to some degree, you may (read MAY or MAY NOT) be able to hook it up to an external box, and pull the information off of it. It's a slim chance though.

Good luck.


Eric the Grey

[Der Cute]

Average life span of hard drives is about 4 years.
You might be able to remove the drive, hook it up to an external usb connector and POSSIBLY...BIG maybe...grab the old data.

From now on, upload info to google docs if you feel comfortable, or keep on at least 2 mediums.

Cutenoob

[Rine]

I have the old drive. I'm actually using the computer it failed on right now. Reinstalled Windows today and I'm still in the process of reinstalling everything else. To top it off, I think my DVD player killed itself after it finished installing Windows. Oi.

I've ordered a USB connector and I'm just hoping. I could have sworn that it was making all its normal noises, you know...everything was fine and then it just died, completely out of the blue. When it failed to boot, it still made normal sounds. Nothing crazy.

I have my stuff backed up on CDs and my really, reaaally important stuff on a CD and a flash drive. I was just a dork and didn't make any *recent* ones.

I am hoping that it was really the age of the harddrive (was going on close to five years) and not some other problem. Does anyone know how to check the health of a harddrive?

[Der Cute]

You can check the state of a hard drive by using Checkdisk
Open command prompt
type chkdsk /r /f at the prompt, and just let it run.

fixes errors on volume and reports bad sectors.

But the best way? Age, and sound. Listen to the drive. If it sounds scritchy or clinky or anything besides a hum...backup!!

[Geek King]

There is one possibility. If it is a motor failure in the drive, then it is possible someone might be able to remove the spindle and plates from inside the drive and mount it into a working HDD case, but I don't meet too many people willing to even try that. Maybe ask around some of the small computer repair shops to see if they have someone. There's still a possibility you'd be throwing away money, but I figured I mention the posibility in case the information is really that important.

If it a flash HDD, you're probably outta luck.

[AccountingDrone]

Some HDDs can be temporarily recovered by freezing them for a few hours then spinning them up to suck the data off. [that is one of the ways data recovery companies try before disassembling and putzing around with the discs themselves]

[LionMan]

My first suggestion would be getting an external enclosure and try installing the drive in that and then mounting it (but not booting from the drive).

[BlackCat]

Some HDDs can be temporarily recovered by freezing them for a few hours then spinning them up to suck the data off. [that is one of the ways data recovery companies try before disassembling and putzing around with the discs themselves]

This is quite good advice. I once recovered some data off a pretty close to dead drive by this method (although I think I only left it in the freezer for an hour - I think you only want it to be very cold, and too long could make the problem worse).
If you do get some life out of the drive as a result, but have problems with some files, you can also try having the drive resting on it's side or upside down or an angle as that may help a little.

However, on the other hand, given the error you've mentioned is about the partition boot record (PBR) it sounds like it is spinning up? A bit a googling suggests that you may be able to recover something using the microsoft recovery console and the "FixBoot" command (I'm not sure if this is what you tried when you said you attempted to repair using the the xp cd).

[Rine]

Hey, thanks for all the tips...I'm going to test out a few things once I receive that little USB connector thingie. I really appreciate everyone's responses!

[Yfandes]

I have been able to pull data from "dead disks" by connecting them to a USB adapter and plugging them into a computer with a different OS to try to yank the data off (ie using a Mac to pull data off a Windows XP disk). Last time was when the University IT pros said the data was "completely unrecoverable"

[Rine]

Okaaay, I got my connector thingie and plugged it in. Heard it spin up and whatnot, but nothing showed up on my computer. No "new hardware" detected when I plugged in the USB connectors. The directions say "Make sure your drive is set to "master." And I have no idea what that means or how to do that.

[Eric the Grey]

Okaaay, I got my connector thingie and plugged it in. Heard it spin up and whatnot, but nothing showed up on my computer. No "new hardware" detected when I plugged in the USB connectors. The directions say "Make sure your drive is set to "master." And I have no idea what that means or how to do that.

It is unlikely that your drive is set to anything else, but just in case...

There is a small section near the plugs on the drive where you have to set a jumper similar to what is shown in this image:

http://premium1.uploadit.org/soundx98//jumpers.gif

(if that link doesn't work, try this and scroll down)

This will only be an example, and will most likely not reflect the way to set your particular drive. If there is not a diagram on your drive somewhere, you may need to Google the make and type of drive to find the jumper settings.



Eric the Grey

[Amadan]

Just a quick post.

You may just find the formatting is a bit borked or there are a load of bad sectors on the drive.

Before you run anything like a chkdsk or hard drive regenerator (if set to fix it can send a drive over the edge), I would suggest either using your usb adaptor for hooking it up directly to a PC (even the one it came out of) and booting from a Ubuntu live CD as Yfandes suggested.

You may find that it can read and therefore copy your data onto another HDD/Flash pen etc, even if it doesn't automagically show up you may well be able to manually mount the drive so you can read from it.

[lordlundar]

It is unlikely that your drive is set to anything else, but just in case...

2 things with this:

1. If it was a separately purchased drive, it would be set to Cable Select.

2. This assumes a PATA connection. SATA doesn't use Master and Slave.


Apart from that, it's accurate. Look at the label of the drive for a diagram of pin settings, or look at the back of the drive (where you plug in the cables) for the pins. Either location (and sometimes both) have which two pins need to be jumpered for a particular setting (the shorthand is MA=master, SL=slave, CS=Cable Select)