Help, Hard drive has died.....

[Gizmo]

It looks like the hard drive has gone on our home PC and I would like to try and recover what I can from it,
has anyone had any experience with or recommend anyone or service that can read the hard drive and pull some of the files back etc.

[recurve]

As long as the disk is still spinning, and the heads are moving, you stand some chance of getting some stuff off. Stick the drive in another PC and set it as a slave rather than master, and you may be able to read stuff off it directly. I have used some software called 'recover my files' with some success when the drive has become otherwise unreadable.

HTH, Phil

[Gizmo]

It is still spinning.... so there is hope, it dies at the windows XP bootup screen. I have run the IDE hard disk self test and it says fail buy a new hard drive...

My PC has the ability to take a second hard drive, so if I purchase a new one (which I am going to have to do anyway) can I use the original recovery CDs to put Windows XP on to the new hard drive and then try and set the old hard disk as slave and recover it that way??

[Scuby]

Certainly worth a try with it as a secondary drive. If its failing part-way through bootup then it might just be a few bad sectors where Windows happens to reside that have died. In that case you should be able to get 99% of your files back.

If it ends up completely dead though, then commercial recovery can be VERY expensive.

And when you do get your data back, get an external hard drive and do regular backups - they're cheap and very large sizes now, I can run a backup very quickly of my laptop, and it really is worth doing... next time

David

[Matt-75]

Yes.

If you had a copy of linux knocking around (and some knowledge of it), i'd say to use dd to make a copy of the hard drive, then run it through one of the many forensic toolkits, to recover as many files as possible, although the main ones you will probably want are in My Documents.

If the hard drive spins up but fails to load windows (or anything), its likely the boot sector has gone. Recover what you can by mounting it as slave and copying on to a newly bought hard drive (ebuyer can do you a 160gb for about £45-50). Trick 2, make regular backups when you have your new hard drive, then you will never lose all your data, because the weekly backup can be found on dvd/cd x.

Good Luck.

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by Matt-75

Yes.

If you had a copy of linux knocking around (and some knowledge of it), i'd say to use dd to make a copy of the hard drive, then run it through one of the many forensic toolkits, to recover as many files as possible, although the main ones you will probably want are in My Documents.

If the hard drive spins up but fails to load windows (or anything), its likely the boot sector has gone. Recover what you can by mounting it as slave and copying on to a newly bought hard drive (ebuyer can do you a 160gb for about £45-50). Trick 2, make regular backups when you have your new hard drive, then you will never lose all your data, because the weekly backup can be found on dvd/cd x.

Good Luck.

Many thanks, found a couple of replacment options on Aria etc... so that side of things I think I can cope with as long as the recovery CDs work. Only problem is it is pre service pack 2 etc...... I have most of the important stuff, pictures etc.. it would just be nice to get those things that I think I haven't saved!!

PS can anyone help with the types of interface, what is SATA, ATA, IDE, SCSI etc

[David]

you might want to disconnect old drive and install windows on the new one
then connect old one as a slave device or as a master on other channel

once you can see it copy every thing you can to your new drive. then turn off disconnect old drive again and work out if what you have coppied is all you want. it might take some time but if the old drive is powered down it should not get any worse. Rather than leaving it powered up and spinning.

I have reformated drives and used them again but you can bet your bottem dollar the moment you put good data on it will fail :-)


David

[Simon A]

Gizmo,
Sata, IDE and ATA are types of Hard disk interface, your home one will be either IDE (the same thing as ATA) or SATA. IDE will use a 40 pin ribbon cable, sata will use a much narrower cable about 1/2 inch wide. If in doubt tell us the model No. off the top of the dead disk and we can tell you.
Do you want a copy of SP2, so you can SP2 the machine before connecting it to the web? If so, I can burn the service pack to CD and drop it off at your work on Monday.
HTH
Simon A

[Bantam]

I have a top tip I have used before.

Buy an external USB Hard Drive Caddy, and place the shagged drive in there. Saves arsing around with master and slave on the IDE drive - especially if it's only got 1 IDE connector on (assuming it's IDE).

Buy 2 new hard drives - fit one into your desktop PC. Keep the other spare...

Rebuild desktop PC, and once it's up and running, connect up the external USB drive (containing shagged disk) and copy as much data as possible off shagged disk onto new Hard Drive.

Then replace shagged disk in USB Caddy with the spare new one you bought as above.

Then BACK UP YOUR FILES TO THE CADDY and keep it somewhere seperate from your Desktop PC - preferably in a different room or whatever.


All of the above can be cheaply obtained from PC World.

It's very rudimentary - if you need more detail, just ask!

Mark.

[Jay]

I lost a hard drive recently during a thunderstorm (yes I know I should have been using surge protectors) - I bought software from Data Recovery Software - File System Utilities and it grabbed it all back for me. Might be worth a look?