My heart is in pieces :(

[sachu]

Looks like the head tracking mechanism might have come loose off the platter or is not able to start tracking...

IT might be repairable..try finding someone in the electrical departmnet who is into this stuff...Most uinversities have a tutoring sessions for electrical and computer science on a few days of the week or an IEEE club, Rocket societies, etc...BUt this is assuming you can't front the money for the professional hard driver repair..

Also, just search for "hard drive head repair" or "hard drive head click" should bring up some tutorials and How tos..even some video repair tutorials...
I have taken apart a hard drive before..it can range from simple to fairly intermediate in complexity if you know what you are doing.

 

[d(((--)))b]

sachu

I think that is too technical for tigress. Plus its a hard-drive with valuable data. I wouldnt even try that eventhough I am on my final year of my computing degree ..Because I just think that is too technical

 

[gadgetman]

Keep the broken disk in a static bag. Keep it safe. KEEP IT AWAY FROM MAGNETS. When you can afford it, get a deal with one of the recovery company (preferably one which can offer a partial refund if they fail to retrieve the data).

If you plug the disk again and power it on, there's a risk of damaging the drive further. Particularly if the head crashed, it'll literally scrape your data off the discs when you power it back on.

There's a good chance your data can be recovered if the drive hasn't been tempered much (magnets, powered on with a crashed head condition, rewriting over old data if it's partially working).

 

[rhythmdevils]

put it in the freezer! i wanna see what happens... that sounds crazy though, i wouldn't do that if it was me, unless i couldn't afford anything else. But yes, back up yo ****!

 

[XXII]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gadgetman /img/forum/go_quote.gif Keep the broken disk in a static bag. Keep it safe. KEEP IT AWAY FROM MAGNETS. When you can afford it, get a deal with one of the recovery company (preferably one which can offer a partial refund if they fail to retrieve the data). If you plug the disk again and power it on, there's a risk of damaging the drive further. Particularly if the head crashed, it'll literally scrape your data off the discs when you power it back on. There's a good chance your data can be recovered if the drive hasn't been tempered much (magnets, powered on with a crashed head condition, rewriting over old data if it's partially working).

This is my suggestion as well. Just store it somewhere safe and wait until you can afford it.

If you're determined to DIY it, there are certain tricks you can do (such as the freezer trick) but you need to determine what exactly is wrong with your hard drive. Did you get the click of death?

 

[nor_spoon]

Sorry to hear that. Lesson learned the hard way.

 

[solessthanthree]

Over the summer, one of my hard drives started to click and used to cause my computer to blue screen on start-up. It was terrible because it was my storage drive where I kept most of my memorable things, but I got a friend to take a look at it and he managed to pull everything off of it. I think its ridiculous that it costs $700 to recover your files, but I guess it's a rather difficult process. Maybe you can see if anyone here can offer you any more assistance. I'm sorry that this has happened. I can totally empathize with you because I went through the same panic when it happened to me. I wish you the best of luck on getting your files back.

 

[iriverdude]

Why didn't you at least make a copy onto DVD-R's? They're only 10-15p each.

 

[gadgetman]

Ok, there's no point of lamenting what could've and should've happen at this point. Hindsight is 20/20. Rather than pointing out what should've happened, you guys may as well share what kind of backup strategy you use if you feel like helping.

Me, I just use Apple's Time Machine. It takes an hourly snapshot of my whole system to an external drive and it's officially supported by the OS with good integration.

Btw, commercial data recovery is different than what you do with data recovery programs like getdataback. Commercial data recovery service can attempt to restore your broken drives, which cannot be accessed by a computer. How?
They can take apart your harddrive, replace the broken part from another harddrive of same\compatible make and model, and rebuild your drive. This requires a Class-1 (or some number I forgot) clean room because any sort of dust particles can wreak havoc inside your sterile drive's cage.

Sometimes data recovery services ask you to bring a brand new harddrive of the same make and model as the broken one for exactly that purpose. (Sacrifice the new one for parts to salvage the broken one).

 

[Tigress]

Quote:

Originally Posted by solessthanthree /img/forum/go_quote.gif but I got a friend to take a look at it and he managed to pull everything off of it.

Can you pleaaaaase ask your friend how he pulled the data of the drive?

...

I am unable to sleep even if I have been trying for the past 3 hours...I wish I could take some pill and forget about it all.

I will try to sleep again.

thanks you for your encouragements all. I really appreciate them...

 

[iriverdude]

For a non PC geek to recover it's quite tricky. I would recommend using another wokring hard drive to boot off from, or perhaps a Ubuntu Live CD. Connect your faulty harddrive as a addtional drive. See if you can access data - copy as much as possible to another drive. If you can't see it at all then it's probably beyond most people and you'll need to send it to a data recovery business.

Controller board is probably the most favourable hardware failure, just buy another identical HD swop boards and away you go. Motor or drive head is pretty terminal.

 

[LostOne.TR]

Definitely keep the hard drive safe and unused for now, while looking for a solution.

I've heard of success stories with the freezing method, but do not personally know anyone who's used it. I'm pretty sure someone will be able to pull some data off (just how much, I wouldn't know. -- really depends on the state of the hard drive), but it's important to keep the hard drive from further use/possible damage in the time being.

 

[milkweg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gz76 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Freezing over night will definitely bring the HDD below the manufacturers specs for operating temperatures, so this doesn't even sound like a good idea. Pay your money and have a professional look at it.

I've read that the freezing trick has worked for quite a few people. YMMV. Regarding these professional companies, I doubt they use microscopy forensic methods because that is extremely expensive. They probably use a software method of some type to image the HDD.

 

[milkweg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by iriverdude /img/forum/go_quote.gif Controller board is probably the most favourable hardware failure, just buy another identical HD swop boards and away you go. Motor or drive head is pretty terminal.

Yep, and that's all these "professional" companies probably do. They certainly don't use microscopy forensics for Joe Blow to recover lost photos of their cat.

 

[RockCity]

This phenomenon reminds me of my old Rio Karma. The reading head will occasionally get stuck to the disc. A swift twack and the thing will work for a few more days.