DATA RECOVERY

[thrombus29]

The primary data disk (40G IBM Deathstar) at one of our sites had itself a Hard crash (lots of clicks, no grinding), The manager of course had no backup.

He took it to Best Buy, I haven't seen the report, but they said it was fried and left it at that.

I am going to try the Freezer trick, which has worked for me in the past, and am wondering what HD file recovery software people have used in case the file tables are messed up.

I only really need one folder out of it.

The other manager got a estimate from a Data Recovery house, between $500-$2000. Ouch.

[ShowMe]

Originally posted by thrombus29
The primary data disk (40G IBM Deathstar) at one of our sites had itself a Hard crash (lots of clicks, no grinding), The manager of course had no backup.

He took it to Best Buy, I haven't seen the report, but they said it was fried and left it at that.

I am going to try the Freezer trick, which has worked for me in the past, and am wondering what HD file recovery software people have used in case the file tables are messed up.

I only really need one folder out of it.

The other manager got a estimate from a Data Recovery house, between $500-$2000. Ouch.

Data Recovery at a professional level isn't going to be cheap. If you're getting clicking and whirring sounds chances are you have something physically wrong inside the drive.

If the drive is completely unrecognizable (ie, you put it into a system as a second drive and still don't see it) you're probably pooched.

If it's just a boot problem you can use sysinternals Remote Recover software (http://www.sysinternals.com, search for remote recover).

If the drive spins up, but you can't see it on the computer AND you have an identical drive you can try removing the controller off of the bad hard drive (this is the card that is physically ocnnected to the hard drive itself; usually requires a very small torx screwdriver ) and swapping it with the good controller. This is not the hard drive controller in the computer, but the card that is connected to the hard drive. Most folks think it's all one piece. I've had good success with that in the past.

In my experience if the drive is making noise and the data is vital, you'll be sending it out.

Good luck.

[TillEulenspiegel]

You can get some low level format software and hope that your "clicking" is just the head doing a seek for track 0. The pro routine is to use forensic software ..which wouldn't seem to be able to help in this case.
Other schema's are replacement of the board ...sloppy and hairey at best and getting an identical drive , park the head, and swap the physical disks. If you try that you must be "clean room " safe and very gentle.
The last scenario is that the disk actually has physical damage. A bump during a seek can scrape off the magnetic media from the platter ( disk ) itself. The last case is the catastrophic model and takes a lot of work. This is accomplished by using low level commands to copy the whole disk to another disk and reviving the data ...which will have gaps-the damage- and hope that you recover enough data to make it a worthwhile exercise kind of like a black box in an airplane crash.
Is the data irreplaceable? If its just crap files that can be reentered by hand ? The cost of physical data re-entry would probably be cheaper in the long run.

[PixyMisa]

Give it a couple of days and try again.

One thing about that generation of Deathstars is that they usually make those nasty sounds for some time before they die for good.

(I speak from considerable - and painful - experience.)

[PixyMisa]

I'll add that I had a server with several 45GB Deathstars die like that.

scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk
scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk
scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk
scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk

Thought it was gone for good. Next day it booted up fine.

[Darat]

And please tell me you then did a full back-up? ;)

[LW]

Originally posted by thrombus29
The manager of course had no backup.


There are two kinds of data: backuped and lost. Sometimes the data doesn't yet know it is lost.

[Soapy Sam]

Originally posted by PixyMisa
I'll add that I had a server with several 45GB Deathstars die like that.

scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk
scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk
scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk
scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk scrunk

Thought it was gone for good. Next day it booted up fine.

I understand it's scrunk six six six that's the very devil.

[ssibal]

A while back I accidentally re-partitioned and formatted the wrong drive, so I found this program called PC Inspector File Recovery. I was able to recover 97% out of 50 gigs. If you get your drive to the point where its working normally, try that program out.

*EDIT* Just to add, the recovery process took about 3 days, but its worth it.

[AzimovFan]

Try SpinRite from grc (http://www.grc.com)

Its not free but it is worth having in your toolbox. I would say that the data recovery professionals should be used if the data is worth their charge, but if you want to risk it yourself as the data is not worth that much but would be nice to have, give SpinRite a go. There is a money back guarantee...

[thrombus29]

Thanks for all the input, I am going to work at it step by step and see what happens.

The data on the disk isn't irreplaceable, (corporate cafeteria accounting records) just boring and time consuming work to re-input it from paper.

Special thanks to ShowMe for that Sysinternals site, they have a lot of great stuff.