My hard drive crashed - any ideas?

When my hard drive crashed I learned about a geek who works on computers part time. He is a gem - cheap and good and a great guy who is now my "go to" person.

Ask around to see if there is someone working from his home - you may be able to recover some of the material for far less than $1000.

kay

When you say "crashed" what symptoms are you having? will the bios recognize the drive, loud clicking, will the hard drive spin up at all? Is this a laptop or desktop? Alot of times it's only the logic board on the bottom of the drive if it doesn't spin up at all, if you can find an exact replacement on ebay or somewhere just swap out he logic and you're back in business.

It may sound crazy but try this. Stick your hard drive in a ziplock back and put it in the freezer for at least 24 hours. Then immidiately plug it back into your pc and boot it up. If you're lucky, you'll get about 20 minutes of usage to pull your data out. I'm an IT Tech by day and learned this from my collegues, I was amazed that it works.

If it sounds too wierd to be true you can google "hard drive freezer recovery" or something along those lines, and you'll see it's been done by a lot of people. Hope this helps.

When that happened to me the first time I took it to a local repair shop and dropped it off. He left the shop saying to the assistant. "See if you can Restore that guy's information."

Somehow the assistant thought it would be the thing to do to install a new OS. He did and I lost everything. Or so I thought.

My daughter Tammy took it to a local university and told the students, you will never be able to find the files on here.

They just had to prove that "they could do anything."

Under the watchful eye of the instructor they did their hocus pocus and found the files we wanted.

My point, you might be able to turn over your PC to a local college/university IT dept and get some good results for free especially if the instructor lets a student or even the class do it for credit. Students will do things for a grade that they wouldn't do for money. We have given a couple of other "assignments" out this way with great results.

Tammy gave a project of an entire 8 page news letter and the instructor made it an assignment. It turned out great.

Now if only I could figure out how to get articles written this way.

George Wright

If you want a coupon code for an online backup solution, PM me. There is one for this weekend.

Computers are what I do.

Hard drives are like light bulbs; matters not how old it is. It can last 1 hour or 20 years.

Regards,
PCRoger.

Hey get yourself a copy of spinrite, it will most likely get your stuff back, you can find plenty of info about it.
Then sign up for a 5 dollar subscription to mozy.

re-boot the whole hard drive again by re-installing your operating system again on your computer

Have you tried using a USB to SATA/IDE cable (as appropriate) to connect the drive to your working computer? They're less than $20 on Amazon.

People have already given great advice on how to get the HD fixed for free so I won't repeat it (I had a HD crash years ago, and I managed to recover text files using some binary reader utility,,, forgot its name but you can boot it off some Linux CD and read the hard drive geometry, and recover files except for any multimedia stuff) that has taught me a valuable lesson: Take backups!

Please do not allow it to happen again and start taking backups!!!

Invest in a couple of external usb hard drives - they are cheap and you can get a terabyte for a good price. Keep all of your important files in ONE directory (make subdirs under it, like music, videos, photos, WSO's, internet marketing tutorials) do not spread your files all over the place. If it's all organized under one directory, it's easy to back up. Keep backups in removable USB hard drives and DVD's (that is what I do) since I don't trust one backup method alone. I was an enterprise backup administrator at Fortune 500 corp for years.... I have seen the super expensive DLT /LTO media fail all the time, and I have seen $100.000 dollar disk storage appliances go bad. I have seen it all so I don't trust any hardware. Online backup is ok if you can upload your files encrypted (Don't trust 3rd parties with sensitive files and data, I have seen companies sued for selling people's data)

Double or triple backup method is your best bet. Keep the backups up to date of course., for a home user I'd say at least a monthly backup if not weekly.

you need to run a hard disk recovery software called ontrack to scan your hard drive and try to find all the lost segment that your drive has. But the file may be bit and pieces but you may NOT know what are they.

For backuping hard drive you should always look for a back up source e.g a CD/DVD or USB flash to backup your important data like customer database if you have any, or any important data you must retain no matter what.

Hopes that help

I think a lot of these people are missing the fact that if the hard drive is physically dead, which is likely with the $1000+ recovery fee, that no software solution will work. Also if it's that dead, it's past the clicking stage.

It cost me $400 to recover parts of files off of a 20 or 30 gig hard drive last year.

While external usb's are handy in a way, they're also a pain of having to set backups as I suggest never leaving them plugged into power or the computer. They are best to backup once a week or month and left in a fire safe in between.

I would suggest setting up a mirrored RAID type system for every day redundancy. I would be running one myself if I had a desktop. I've got a terabyte of data and I'd hate to lose it. As it is I need a second 2 terabyte external hard drive to back up my external terabyte drive.

I lost a handful of important files a few years back on my XP machine. There are a few ways to create copies of your files.

1. Use an external HDD. For less than $100 you get good external drives with one touch backup. Just press a button and the software will back all your folders onto the drive.
2. Backup small documents in a pendrive.
3. Backup documents like your WSO's and save them in your email account.

The chances of all devices failing at the same time is very low.

Hey,

I'm not an expert in this area and probably can't help. However, I can sympathise. I carry around a 40GB external hard drive excised from my old laptop. I use it like a flash drive as a sad reminder that if you don't back things up and keep hardware maintained, you're screwed.

I'm saving up for a new computer. This was the cheepest option for me now, opposed to paying money for them to 'try' a fresh install that 'might' work.

Wish you luck,

Guy

First, the freezer deal should be the LAST resort. I could see how that could work, as some drives can work if they are very cold, heat can generate quickly and, if they are out of tolerance, they won't work if they get too hot. Still, a lot can fail ALSO! If your logic board is bad, the freezer is likely to make it WORSE.

If the drive doesn't read, but SPINS, try a way of setting the geometry right(some interfaces allow this). If it STILL fails to read, the logic board is a good thing to try. if it STILL doesn't spin, go to step 4.

1. BACKUPS! If you don't have any, try using a fault tolerant file program. Note files that don't copy.
2. If the bad files are needed, try to copy them several times to another disk. A "soft" error may actually allow you to copy them sometimes.
3. At THIS point, if you dare, you could try the freezer deal. It isn't TOO likely to work, but MAYBE some hard errors can become soft, and you can get the files like #2.
4. Some places CAN take the drive apart and recover data. THESE are places that charge hundreds or thousands of dollars though.

Steve

I have the VERY SAME hard drive crashed. And I found on the internet that those HD had a frimware problem. All of them, in less than 8 months, all Crashed!

Mine is the exactly same model as yours and I am still trying to find a solution.

I found one, but it is TOO technical for me: Fixing a Seagate 7200.11 Hard Drive (Fixing a Seagate 7200.11 Hard Drive)

digigo,

If you have the money, look at ReadyNAS. You can start with 2 drives (RAID1) and add more seemlessly.

There are screws, but the drives are hotswap; and the drives that come with the units are ENTERPRISE level drives, not cheap junk.

Look at 1nas (dot) com

Regards,
PCRoger.

I had this happen to me few years ago. I went to a local computer shop who was able to recover most of my data. They replaced the hard drive's mother board and ran quite a few recovery software on the drive. Took a few days and cost was around $200.00, but I purchased a new computer rebuild from them and they ended up not charging me for the recovery.

That rebuild computer lasted me until Windows 7 came out. It actually is still in the other room it just isn't plugged in at all now.

Spin rite is old software and does not recognize 64 bit operating system partitions.
There are much better options out there now. Though if you can't access the drive at all I wouldn't touch it and just take it to a recovery specialist. Look in the yellow pages and also online for your local area, here we have a couple computer shops that do recovery, the one I used also had an association with a 3rd party lab if I remember correctly. If I had to have the drive sent to the lab it would have cost over 1k.

They ended up taking the board off of the drive and replace it with one they had in the store, they had many other types of boards laying around too. I had them take some of my older hard drives that ahd data on them and compile all the drives on to one larger drive. They gave me the old drives including the broken one back to me.

The freezor trick mentioned above does not work in all cases and totally depends on the problem the drive has. In my case it would not have worked.

- Terry

While Spinrite 6 is 4-5 years old by now, it still works for a lot of problems.
While you are correct that it is not 64 bit, I would guess that most users are not 64 bit yet either.
Most of the people I know thatare 64 bit are the hard core tech/geek type,not your average user.

I can't tell you how many times Spinrite saved the day for me back when I had my repair shop.