Does This Hard Drive Sound Beyond Repair?
I'll always be indebted to you guys for your help last year in getting my data back from an old laptop when it failed.
Knowing how it feels to think you've lost cherished digital memories of your children I'm currently trying to recover files from a friend's hard drive. It's an external USB-type disk. When I said I'd try for them I kind of promised it would be recoverable. I assumed it would be a data problem such as a bad sector and I'd easily recover the data using BartPE, which saved my bacon last year.
As soon as I turned the drive on I realised it was worse than a data problem. Things just didn't sound right at all.
In trying to get to the bottom of things I removed the disk form its housing and plugged it in to an old server I've got knocking about. Here's what it sounds like during boot-up:
Notice the screen at the end of the video. Looking at the screen it appears that the Secondary Master disk is recognised and named in the list of drives but then comes the message:
"Secondary master hard disk fail"
So far I've not managed to get past this point or tried booting from BartPE. For now I wanted your opinion on the outlook for this drive. Is it good? I really want to help my friend regain "most of the videos" of his 3 year old son.
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One of our support guys has had reasonable success with putting the hard drive in the freezer for a couple of hours and then immediately pulling the data off. Works where suspected mechanical failure because of tolerance changes at temperature. Pretty much a last resort though.
good luck
When ever I hear a drive make this noise, its dead -- most likely from a hard knock.
All is not lost though if your friend can stomach the cost of getting a professional involved. They'd pop the platters into a similar drive and get the data back. Miracles is what they work -- and they charge accordingly for it.
I have heard of some geeks doing a similar job themselves but first you have to source an identical working drive and then very carefully take the old one to bits. I've tried this once and found it quite tricky getting the platter out without damaging the arms that hold the heads. Needless to say, I failed but it was just a learning exercise rather then a real life disaster recovery operation.
I've tried the freezer trick as well but it didn't work. The nature of the failure would have a significant part to play in this methods success rate.
Good luck -- I've been involved in dozens of these over the years so I feel the pain.
If you're gonna stick it in a freezer, put it in a sealed bag first.
It sounds as if it's dead. In the old days, I would have knocked on a failing hard drive, but nowadays they are so sensitive that the knock possible makes it worse.
These guys: http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk/ quote around £300 to recover the disk.
I did the same for my sister. Involved the professionals. It was in the $500 CDN range if I remember correctly, but for her, very well worth it.
To quote the guy who fixed it. "If it spins, it'll die."
I have *always* had success using SpinRite. It is an *amazing* program that you should always have available in your toolkit.
Check it out --> http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Good luck!
I second Chris's Suggestion Spinrite ALWAYS worked for me too.
The drive sounds like it's stuck. Tapping it may help, older drives you had to really slam but new ones are a little more fragile.
Never heard the freezer trick, that's different.
Norton used to have some great disk tools but I haven't played with it in a few years to know if they still exist.
You can try running Windows install cd against it like you were going to install it and see if it will let you in, sometimes I have had luck with it at that level for some reason.
Broken control arm it sounds like. It's finished, unless you send it off to the professionals. The data is more than likely fine on the 'platter(s)'.
I agree with GShappell. I had something similar happen years ago. Friend of mine did it old school and opened it up and transplanted the platters into another drive.
Not for the inexperienced or feint of heart.
Thanks for all your suggestions! I will give spinrite a shot and then he's going to have to fork out for the boffins to take over... at least I tried.
He doesn't want to let anyone he doesn't know really well anywhere near that hard drive. I've heard Thailand is a hard place to get into in a hurry recently.
Charge him £60 Jake.
I'd help out but my freezer's full of soup I made last weekend, sorry.
Good luck. I want to rip an hard drive apart now! Never done it, sounds cool ! I stripped down and rebuilt a friends Sony Vaio laptop last week and understand how there is a fine line between focussed pressure and force to achieve results or flip out and ruin the day!
Mark
I've had success recovering data from hard drives with Hiren's --> http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
But none was making sounds like the one you have.
Hi, Jake.
That hard drive sounds very bad ... It's trying to start moving the plates but it can't ...
I guess the drive is damaged at hardware level ( the axis or the electric engine that moves the plates ... )
If the data inside is VERY IMPORTANT for you you can hire the services of a specialized data retrieval company ... But it will cost you a lot of money, sure!
Friends of mine sometimes recover this hitting ¿Is this the word? the drive against a hard surface. The hit must be moderated and dry ... But this is the last action to do with your hard drive, of course!
This drive sounds just like my Hitachi drive, and I cant get anything off it, however for once luckily it was in my USB raid array,so I have not lost the 500gb of data on it..
Stick with Seagate next time :) Never liked Maxtor!
Hi guys
I am stuck with the same problem.
Is there any development or news regarding this kind of failure?
From 04-12-2008 no input for this string.
Please update if it some thing new is there.
Thanks in advance
M Tariq Zarrar
"The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for"