My Hard Drive Crashed

[Gomboman]

My primary hard drive crashed last week. I have a backup hard drive installed in my PC but I lost about six months of backup data--mostly digital photos.

I took it to a local PC repair shop but they didn't have any luck restoring the data. They said my hard drive is mechanically functional but it has a boot sector failure.
The PC technician told me to go to Drive Savers. He said it would be about $700 to restore my data--ouch. Do I have any other options before I re-format my drive?

[wmccall]

Typically with boot sector failures you can put the drive in as a second drive somewhere else and copy the data off. I would assume they tried that. Datac recovery places to charge about that much or more.

[Gomboman]

Typically with boot sector failures you can put the drive in as a second drive somewhere else and copy the data off. I would assume they tried that. Datac recovery places to charge about that much or more.

No, I tried that before I sent it in. I think it's going to take a higher level of repair. The disk won't even respond to the System Repair through Windows. The technician said that it will have to be opened in a Clean Room to salvage the data. I'm not sure how sharp he is. I think he was a year out of high school. I'll probably have to take it in somewhere else for a second oppinion.

[NE-Phil]

Gomboman,
I've had some success with Steve Gibson's SpinRite. You can find it at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm. This product has been around since 1988. Originally, just for FAT but now also NTFS formatting. For a new user, it costs $89 so it's not cheap but it has been useful at home and work.

Phil

[jeremy]

  If it's a boot sector failure you should be able to pull data off it as a second disk.  If that's not the case you have a controller error/failure or a head failure/crash.

  If the BIOS detects it, you may be able to use SpinRite and recover data.  I've had decent luck with it.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

  $700 seems fair.  The last time I had to use a recovery service like that it cost $1000 for a 60GB laptop hard disk.  They were able to recover everything.

  I've heard of some ghetto hackers being able to recover data in situations like these by placing the drive in a ziplock bag then putting it in the freezer over night.  Hook it up while its still cold, pull the data off it, then put it in the garbage. Also, sometimes you can get the disk to read if you place it upside down before powering it on.  Regardless, the best thing to do is not use it until you have a recovery plan in place.  You'll have to decide if the value of the data is worth ghetto or pro.  I'm not responsible either way!

[cooltoy2000]

I have seen the fridge thing work. Our IT guy at work does it all the time.

[Gomboman]

 If it's a boot sector failure you should be able to pull data off it as a second disk.  If that's not the case you have a controller error/failure or a head failure/crash.

  If the BIOS detects it, you may be able to use SpinRite and recover data.  I've had decent luck with it.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

  $700 seems fair.  The last time I had to use a recovery service like that it cost $1000 for a 60GB laptop hard disk.  They were able to recover everything.

  I've heard of some ghetto hackers being able to recover data in situations like these by placing the drive in a ziplock bag then putting it in the freezer over night.  Hook it up while its still cold, pull the data off it, then put it in the garbage. Also, sometimes you can get the disk to read if you place it upside down before powering it on.  Regardless, the best thing to do is not use it until you have a recovery plan in place.  You'll have to decide if the value of the data is worth ghetto or pro.  I'm not responsible either way!

I went back to the PC store today to find out what exactly they did. This is what was in their notes file. The technician who did the work was off.
 
1. Ran hard drive test. Both drives are good, but we can't get any data off of the primary drive due to the OS being corrupted.  
2. Unable to to run a windows repair on the unit.
3. Transfered data files off slave drive to backup. Re-installed OS on slave drive and made it the bootable drive. Transfered data files back onto working drive.
 
The person who I talked to today also suggested freezing the hard drive. I laughed when I heard about the freezing method. I'm curious how that would work?  
 
The BIOS doesn't recognize the drive.  I still can't read off it either with my new drive working correctly. When it's set as a slave drive I get an error that the disk is bad and then it goes through a check disk routine.
 
My wife wants to murder me for not backing up our data. I'm ussually pretty good but I got lazy. Learn from my mistake and backup your data please. Thanks for the help.  

[wmccall]

I can see two possible reasons for the freezer to work.

1. Electronics that fail when warm.
2. The drive platters or heads are warped and cooling may contract them so that the drive spins ok, at least for awhile.

[jeremy]

The BIOS doesn't recognize the drive.  I still can't read off it either with my new drive working correctly. When it's set as a slave drive I get an error that the disk is bad and then it goes through a check disk routine.

 If the BIOS doesn't recognise it, it's probably the controller and freezing probably wont help.  You may be able to buy the same model drive off Ebay, swap the controller board, and give it a go.  That would be the first thing a drive recovery place would try.  As long as the drive doesn't click/squeel/whine it might work.

  You may want to consider setting up a disk mirror.  2 drives and a RAID controller and you won't have to worry about backups.

[Campsalot]

Gomboman I would suggest you get your self a good external hardrive and firewire it to your PC and do mirror image backups.  This makes a mirror image (aka duplicate copy)of your main hard drive.

Curious?  What was our OS on th old drive?  Was it an original version or a  upgrade to that OS?

[Gomboman]

Gomboman I would suggest you get your self a good external hardrive and firewire it to your PC and do mirror image backups.  This makes a mirror image (aka duplicate copy)of your main hard drive.

Curious?  What was our OS on th old drive?  Was it an original version or a  upgrade to that OS?

XP Workstation Original Version.  Any suggestions on a decent external hard drive that I can purchase for next time? My system is old--3 years old. My bootable drive is a 80GB EIDE drive.

[Campsalot]

I would suggest a Western Digital HD.  Stay with the firewire as I think your PC's USB's will be to slow to hack the speed.  Check this link out

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2204138&Sku=W10-3008

Good luck!

[svspa]

gombo, campsalot,

Cnet did a review of these not too long ago:

[link]http://reviews.cnet.com/Western_Digital_MyBook_Premium_Edition_500GB_External_Hard_Drive/4505-3186_7-31793438.html[/link]

Super fast read speeds but not so good write speeds, maybe not the best for a backup drive.

I bought a couple of them for my kids when they went to college. Good for storing files that need fast read speeds (video, music), but with a backup drive you would be writing more than reading so maybe not the best.

Steve

[vlady]

Sorry, but I cannot recommend the Western Digital external drives.  Hopefully, they have improved over the last few years.

I purchased one a few years ago and within 30 days, it crashed.  Fortunately, I hadn't backed up anything to it that I didn't have another copy of.  I returned it to the manufacturer and they provided me with a new one.  

This one seemed stable so we copied more than 30 websites along with all the original artwork to it.  It crashed within 60 days.  I took the drive to a data recovery place and they were unable to recover anything.  It cost me several hundred dollars just to let them try the different methods of recovery and still they could not recover it - everything was lost.

Now I just back up everything to several different places.  I figure my odds are pretty good that not all of them will crash at once.

[svspa]

and of course the safest approach might be to get a dual layer DVD recordable drive and backup to DVD. You can then put the DVD's in a safe place. Not as automatic as a backup hard drive but as vlady points out even your backup HDD can fail.

Steve