Shoutbox

I kept hearing noises yesterday and prior to that once in a while I had heard a click noise but it never did anything..... then yesterday I hear this low rustling like metal very lightly brushing something and this sound like your monitor makes when it turns on or off and the screen goes dark... this happened multiple times would stop then start again.... thought it was a fan at first.... then I heard what was obviously an attempt to start up again like a fan noise over and over... finally I did something which would access that HDD and the computer froze.... even the turn off button wouldn't work nor the cursor... so I hit reset.... it didn't want to come up..... finally got the off button on tower to work and when it came up I just had a D drive with no label unlike the way I'd had 4 partions I made with partition magic years ago would have shown and got the message about formatting

Ok so we have a dead hardrive..and we have a estimate of $120 to get the information of it that i need ..apparently they use some sort of software to remove and copy the files that I need on the hardrive.
The computer is showing that physical hard drive on the list of drives BUT has no partitions showing for it and when I click on that physical HDD icon it pops up saying it isn't formatted and asking me if I want to do so... since I want those files of course I click no.



Does anyone know of the software they use?

the first thing i would try doing would be to check the disk
Start -> run -> cmd -> enter
now type: chkdsk X: /F /R
where X is the drive letter of the bad disk

This will take a very long time to do if it is a large drive and it has lots of data on it. do not do anything else on the computer while it is running, and do not close the program until it finishes. This may take many hours depending on the size of drive, damage to the drive, and amount of data on the drive.

IF that works, get everything off of it that you need in a big hurry before it crashes again!

I would not recommend the following until it is a very last resort to get your data!
Put your drive in a sealed plastic bag and freeze it in the freezer overnight. Hook up the drive back to the computer without mounting it and with the side panel off, so the drive can stay cold for as long as possible. Start the computer, and start praying. If you can access the drive, get it off before the drive thaws out again, because after it thaws, it is unlikely to ever work again.

This method is basically a Red Green - duct tape method, and I do not recommend unless you have tried everything else 

Are you serious? You're going to let water/ice go near electricity?

there is no water/ice if you do it right: note the SEALED PLASTIC BAG part. note the the IT WON"T WORK AGAIN part

It doesn't matter if you leave it in the bag or not, there will still be moisture in the air in the bag. If you want to have moisture inside your drive and then connect it, go a head. Or you could drive many different ways (Recuva, Spinrite) before you do the dangerous thing.

I think doing what MeEtc suggested (the HDD freezing) is the worst what you can do.

As linx05 said, if you get the drive out of the freezer there will always be air condensing, aka tiny water bits will be all over the electronics. If you want to short circuit everything, including possible your computer electronics, go ahead...

I never heared of this method... I also don't see why it even would work at all. Magnetism isn't going to be suddenly higher or whatever when you freeze a magnetic plate, if that is what this is based upon. When you freeze conductors the resistans will be lower (but then again this is for extreme low temperatures, at just -10°C or whatever there wont be any significant difference at all), but what this has todo with suddenly being able to read the magnetic fields again, I dunno...

I am very curious where you heared this.

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PS: also attempting to do Chkdsk /F in cases like this will probably makes things worse!

The first thing you need to do in cases like this is getting the HDD out and putting it in a system which you know works 100%. But do not run any disk fixing tool (and certainly not crappy chkdsk!!). See if you can get your hands on software which can read drives in a low level pure physical way. You might need to do manual searching and stuff for data on the disc though.

The reason why you should not run any fixing tool at first (and certainly not chkdsk) is that such tools write stuff back to the HDD. But almost all fixing tools will not be able to read such faulty drives.

So what they will do is writing data back to the HDD in an attempt to make it readable again and in doing so they will overwrite the data which was on the HDD before (but which they can't not read and thus don't know it even exist, hence why they simply start writing as if nothing is there anyways).

quote:

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
I think doing what MeEtc suggested (the HDD freezing) is the worst what you can do.

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that's why I said in big, red letters, don't do it unless you have done EVERYTHING else.
The theory behind it is that all the materials shrink ever so slightly. Don't ask me why it works, but I have heard of it being done successfully from one of my college teachers.

Hard drive freezing is a well known trick, but it is used for a different drive problem than the original poster seems to have.  It sometimes works for drives that won't spin up.

The original poster's hard drive failure sounds like a classic head crash.  I'd expect the $125 software "recovery" (probably marketed by a local computer shop, not a professional data recovery service) to produce only some of the files, many corrupted -- unless they get very lucky and the only problem with the drive is some bad sectors.

Serious recovery, that actually recovers everything regardless of the type of failure, will cost much more than $125 and involves disassembling the drive. 

quote:

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Originally posted by Adeptus
Serious recovery, that actually recovers everything regardless of the type of failure, will cost much more than $125

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Last time I checked it was about $50 per MB... and you can't choose the MB so you'll have to recover the entire disk...
So if your harddrive is 80gig (taking a wild guess here...)
it will cost 80.000*50 = $4 million
The data probably isn't worth that...

free undelete  works,
but wat you need to do is take your disk out to preserve the head.
get a  new harddrive, download pe builder http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder burn it to a disk,
restart your computer into bart pe to make sure your disk works turn your computer off,
reconnect the disk (the dead one)
then turn the computer back on run undelete using the file explorer in bart pe
now set the software to recover to the different drive and hope for the best results wat you are trying to do will probally need to run for a while