Hard Drive recovery

[chadknowslaw]

I had a hard drive crash on my home PC that wasnt backed up [trust me--it WONT happen again] that has all my personal photos on it. Other than the My Documents and My Pictures folders, there really isn't anything on that drive that isn't replaceable. So far, the lowest quote I have for recovering the drive is $550. I was hoping it would be about half that much. Anybody have any suggestions for me?

I have already bought external hard drives that automatically back up every night for my other PC's--hopefully I won't have to do this again.

[Chilihost]

Chad, that is a remarkably low price for such a service, when I took my hard drive in for recovery after getting it fried by lightning they said it would start at $5,000 and that would not guaranty anything usable either.

If the hard drive is still operational (ie, power, etc) you can try to use some recovery software, that might be a cheaper option but that is aimed more at those who delete files and want to undelete them.

cheers,
Luke

[gaybucks_chip]

If the drive will power up, the software made by runtime.org (GetDataBack) has saved my ass a couple times. I think it's about $100, but you'll need a blank spare drive; for safety, it doesn't write anything to the damaged drive. And if their software doesn't do the job, they offer very reasonably priced data recovery (ususally in the $300-600 range), but they only work with software issues; if there is an electronic or mechanical problem with the drive, they won't be able to help.

I echo Luke's comments; $550 is very, very cheap for data recovery. I know a lot of ppl that have paid $3K-10K.

[JustMe]

Greetings:

Did you try putting it in a zip-lock bag and sticking it in the freezer for a couple of hours?

[chadknowslaw]

Greetings:

Did you try putting it in a zip-lock bag and sticking it in the freezer for a couple of hours?

What will that do???

[Bec]

It is a viable solution for getting "stuck" drives running again. Worth trying depending on what "broke".

[gaybucks_chip]

I have a fair amount of experience with the freezer solution -- I used to fix computers for a living long ago -- and for the limited use and purpose it serves, it can work really well.

If you have a drive that has intermittent read failures, meaning it will start to read a file and then give a read error, in some cases freezing the drive for several hours will enable you to read the bad sectors long enough to copy them off to another drive. Also, if you have one of the famous Western Digital drives that makes the awful drive-head-seek-click-of-death sound, it will sometimes allow you to access data on a drive with that problem. And I've heard of it temporarily reviving a drive where the spindle motor is dying and it won't spin up. But it will only help you if those are the specific circumstances.

The issue seems to be that freezing the drive makes the sectors easier to read for some reason (physics was never my thing.) But the problem is, the drive will heat up within about two or three minutes of being powered up and you'll get the read errors again, so you either have to copy your files really fast (if there are only a couple of smaller ones) or resort to a more drastic procedure. You can put the drive inside several layers of plastic bags, each individually sealed with a twist tie, and then put the entire assembly, bags and all, (with data and power cables attached) into a bucket of ice, submerged except for the top inch or so of the drive where the cables are coming up.

I've had several of the "click of death" drives that I revived long enough to get crucial data off that way. But if the problem is a different one -- the 'drive not formatted" error, or corruption in the file allocation table, then the freezing solution won't help.

Hope that clarifies things.

[Corey Bryant]

As far as the freezer, it depends on how old your HD is. It can eliminate the 'sticktion' problem and get an old drive spinning again that otherwise wouldn't. With modern hard drives it seems like something else usually goes before the bearings so this trick might be less useful in the future.