Hard drive data recovery

Upier

[upier]

I just had my hard drive fail. It stopped spinning. Does anyone have experience with a company that recovers the data off a broken hard drive? What price is reasonable? What type of success rate is expected?

[AppyPappy]

Whack it around a few times and see if it spins back up.

[1rudeboy]

Might be a power failure to the hard drive. Don't panic. Yet.

[spycatcher]

IBM drive?

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

Could be a couple of reasons why you had a failure. Before you pay hundreds of dollars to take it to a recovery shop, pop it in as a slave drive and see if you can reach the data from another system.

If it is really dead and you can't get it to respond as a slave, then you are looking at up to a couple of hundred dollars for a 75% chance or so of recovery.

[kingu]

Have a neighbor report you to the FBI for having child porn on the hard drive; they'll pull every inch of data off your machine... :)

Seriously, data recovery companies charge through the nose for this type of work. Success rate is generally high, some companies will pull all the data off, place it on a new hard drive for you, and give you a bill upwards of a thousand dollars. They know that the only people who will be using this service will be desperate for the data to be recovered, and charge accordingly.

Wacking the hard drive on the left or right edge (when facing the hard drive straight on from the front or the back) can sometimes re-start a stuck hard drive. I had one that lived for half a year with a good wack at startup each time. If it does work, save all data immediately to another device (CD-RW, DVD-RW, another hard drive.)

Don't bother with any of the off the shelf or website advertised software programs, they don't work and you'll just be wasting money (and possibly damaging to the data.)

[ikka]

Some people have had good success by freezing the drive, then immediately using it after pulling it from the freezer. The cold causes the metal to shrink slightly, increasing the tolerances between parts in the drive.

[backhoe]

Links of interest:

http://www.runtime.org/

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

http://www.overclockers.com/tips676/

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1143957/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1138212/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/856194/posts

Just off the top of my head-- check your cables, try another power connector ( like from a floppy or CD known to spin up ), try the drive in another PC.

It's a good idea to clone your HD to a spare every week or so- drives are so cheap now.

[Riley]

Good idea- I am going to add that to my bag of tricks.

[firewalk]

.

[dennisw]

plug an un plug all connectors

how do you kow it's not spinning? some old ibms do suck, i've had it happen to me

[Wooly]

Try the freezer Technique as this has worked in the past. Also go to the manufacture's website and check the serial number to see if it is still under warranty so that you can get a replacement drive for free.

[Michael121]

Simple.... put it in the freezer for about an hour..... you might be able to get back data if you want to send it to a recovery company it will cost you a bundle.

[numberonepal]

I've tried the freezing method before, but you better hurry because after the drive warms back up again and indeed it is a mechanical failure it will revert back to its "broken" state. If you can get it to work, your first order of business is to start making backups.

[Feckless]

A couple of things:
Make sure it is getting 12V and 5V both (the 12V would be suspect here)
(Gently) tap on it, also do several re-starts while doing this.
Move it to another PC as the slave drive (assuming it's IDE) and try the above.
Last resort: I have pulled the cover off of drives to unstick stepper motors and gently give the platters a spin with some success. Have it in as the slave if you do with plenty of space on the master to copy all you need to get off it and assume you'll never use it again.

[Swingj]

I have had some success with finding an identicle drive and removing the circuit board off the bottom of the good drive and putting it on the bad drive. The Drives must have the same part number. Sometimes the board is the reason you can't get the data off.These boards are usually only held on by a few screws and a ribbon cable (in most cases) If the drive is making a clunking noise...... it may require a more invasive approach from a Disaster Recovery company. Hope this helps !!!!!

[bushrocks04]

The same thing happened to my hard drive a few months back.I called the three authorized places that Dell told me to call (I was still still under warrenty) Each place wanted hundreds of dollars to do the job but the nice guy at the third place told me to take it to Best Buy which I did and they charged me $65.00.

[Who dat?]

Our COO had a drive that crashed. He used a company out of San Jose to recover the data. It was expensive.

The guy from the data recovery company had spent his career working at Seagate or somewhere. He said the first step was that they’d take the bad drive and scrounge around and try to find *at least* two identical working drives (preferrably new/unused). Then they’d take them all into a clean room and disassemble them and try to use parts from the good ones to recover the data. He said that, depending how it goes, they may need to get additional identical drives.

They required something like a $3,000 deposit and guaranteed *nothing*.

Our COO was primarily interested in recovering his address book and web page “favorites” list. I recall that they recovered nearly everything and it ended up costing ~$8,500. The company paid for it in his case. This would have been in 2000, so maybe they have better/different/cheaper ways of doing things now.

[BB2]

You DO put the drive in a plastic bag before you put it in the freezer don't you?