anyone know any hard drive recovery methods

grodge

hey ppl,

my laptop decided to put a bios password on itself and the hard drive is knackered (sound of loose bits in it when i took it out!!)

does anyone know of any company or ppl who are able to recover data from damaged hard drives. backed up most of my stuff but there are some current work projects and and emails i really need so if anyone can help it would be great.

grodge

Hal1

You could try a caddy to retrieve the data and copy to another drive.



I think maplin sell them.

majiktripp

I recommend http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk/ as they are very good to deal with and will give you a rough quotation through their website.I haven't used them personally before but I have heard from a good authority that they come highly recomended,they're based in Wales are far as I recall.
The post above seems like a bit of a shill prehaps?

Tom Dunne

majiktripp wrote: »

The post above seems like a bit of a shill prehaps?

A bit of a shill?

Just to show how asleep I am this morning, I actually reported that post, to myself.

Deleted and banned.

Capt'n Midnight

Hardware problem
If the drive is making sharp noises ending in K then data recovery specialist
clickclicklclickclickclickclick
clunk
sounds like a ball bearing dropping
drive spinning up for 3 seconds and then stopping - even when not attached to a data cable

Software problem or bad sectors/surface defects on an otherwise working drive
softer sounds ending in G may just be the OS try a USB drive or a bootable CD ( knoppix / ubuntu etc.. browsing -- ddrescue )
chugchugchug
ssssssss sizzsizzsizz ssssss ssss


Local shops will be able to help with software problems, BUT if they are incompetant they will make things worse. Very few places do real hardware recovery and most of the ads you see are for middle men who send it off to the few guys with the clean rooms and equipment to do the job.

If would be nice to have a list of the real data recovery companies to sepeate out the me too's

There is a crowd in Belfast offering fixed price recovery for about £300 - can't remember the name though.

Capt'n Midnight

other tricks - use only if you aren't prepared to pay for professional data recovery and have written the drive off. They are kill or cure and by cure I mean you might get one boot and will have to be ready to backup all the data straight away.

freezer - put hdd in ziplock freezer bag so it's totally waterproof, overnight, then remove and let get to room temperature before doing anything to it

replace PCB on drive, make sure it's the same make and model, and firmware too to be safe. If the failed disk had a hard drive crash that caused the controller on the PCB to be overdriven ( quantum take a bow ) it's quite possible that you will fry the PCB and so the donor drive will now be a paperweight too.

stiction if the drive boots sometimes AND it's over 5 years old it may be sticktion since the oil has evaporated or some such, light tapping at boot might get it to respond - too much tapping will of course kill it HDD's do not like vibration, I used an old SCSI drive to provide the vibration instead of tapping

majiktripp

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

freezer - put hdd in ziplock freezer bag so it's totally waterproof, overnight, then remove and let get to room temperature before doing anything to it

replace PCB on drive, make sure it's the same make and model, and firmware too to be safe. If the failed disk had a hard drive crash that caused the controller on the PCB to be overdriven ( quantum take a bow ) it's quite possible that you will fry the PCB and so the donor drive will now be a paperweight too.

stiction if the drive boots sometimes AND it's over 5 years old it may be sticktion since the oil has evaporated or some such, light tapping at boot might get it to respond - too much tapping will of course kill it HDD's do not like vibration, I used an old SCSI drive to provide the vibration instead of tapping

Three dynamite tips there, have used them all to varying degrees of success but especially the freezer trick (also throw in a little pack of silica gel that comes with new runners etc to stop moisture build up) which work quite well in at least giving the drive 10-15minutes of life, enough to pull that data off.
PCB replacement is a bit more tricky in the fact it has to be a pretty much identical drive you take the pcb off but I did it myself for a family friends hard drive which worked a a treat!
Some good tips!

humaxf1

what was the hang up about "shilling" hal1's post?

all he/she did was post a pic of a hdd cage, not a caddy, for insertion into a laptop. lots of people recommend maplin, peats, komplett (need i go on) all the time!

then majiktripp recommends the disk recovery website

Tom Dunne

humaxf1 wrote: »

what was the hang up about "shilling" hal1's post?

all he/she did was post a pic of a hdd cage, not a caddy, for insertion into a laptop. lots of people recommend maplin, peats, komplett (need i go on) all the time!

then majiktripp recommends the disk recovery website

There was another post you can't see that was deleted.

humaxf1

ah ha, ok. get you now.

thanks

Chardee MacDennis

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

freezer - put hdd in ziplock freezer bag so it's totally waterproof, overnight, then remove and let get to room temperature before doing anything to it

will this void my warranty if i do this? my stupid Hitachi travelstar drive failed and I would like to get another one from em but they wont recover my data and i cant afford to recover it.

Capt'n Midnight

Call_me_al wrote: »

will this void my warranty if i do this? my stupid Hitachi travelstar drive failed and I would like to get another one from em but they wont recover my data and i cant afford to recover it.

you might get away with it or maybe not. you probably won't recover the data. They won't recover the data because that costs far more than the drive does and besides they probably feel you are supposed to buy another drive from them to back up on to

me wrote:

other tricks - use only if you aren't prepared to pay for professional data recovery and have written the drive off. They are kill or cure and by cure I mean you might get one boot and will have to be ready to backup all the data straight away.

witnessmenow

Capt'n Midnight , i dint think it was possible to reproduce the sound of a dying hard drive in text form, but damn it you gave it a pretty good stab!
Do you reckon it will boot into windows(i assume) for him if you put it in the freezer? Or will he need a bootable disk? Don't have the problem just find it really interesting that a night in the freezer can help!

Chardee MacDennis

well just tried to copy my backup folder from June and the original hard drive file system just corrupted itself midway through the restore. this may be the worst weekend ever. trying the freezer trick on the hitachi at the moment.