How to salvage a possibly dead hard drive?

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Hey, I'm in mega computing strife and I wonder if anyone could help me.

Got up this morning, still suffering a bit from flu. I switched my computer on - it didn't load up. After a black screen, I got the start of the Windows XP loading screen and then it quickly switched to the blue 'screen of death' and then repeated the process in a continual loop.

Took hard drive out, put into another computer, booted off that hard drive - the hard drive from the other computer wasn't responding. The computer reported 0 data on it. I couldn't

I realise that the hard drive could well be dead, but I really want all the professional and personal resources back off it, if possible. Some are irreplaceable. I would be utterly devastated if they were gone - years and years worth of memories and creativity.

Can anyone help? Even if it is to recommend software that has worked for them and will help me get my resources back.

I had a similar problem about two years ago. I thought the problem was the hard drive with the OS. It wasn't. The RAM chips simply became defective so I replaced them.

Just in case it was the hard drive, I bought a new SSD and installed that in my computer instead. For my hard drive, which I hated to lose because it was 1 GB, I bought an external 3.5" USB 3 enclosure.

Well it can't be that, because it's still not doing anything in another computer.

I feel so cross right now.

Of course, you know that drives die sometimes and because of that have backed up all of your data, right?

Welllll... I had backed them up, then three months ago I leant the backup drives to someone...when I got them back, I stupidely didn't copy across again.

I never knew a hard drive could go so quick without any warning at all. Ignorance is no excuse, really, is it.

Running a well-recommended demo by prosoft engineering to see if there is anything to salvage. Only another nine hours to go...

Well, the good news is the type of failure that you've described is the one with the best chance of recovering data. However, drives can (and do, believe me) die at the least opportune times.

I once had a fleet of servers with over 300 drives arrive - got installed, and within a month almost 100 of them were dead.

One common technique is to put the hard drive in the freezer for an hour or two, take it out, start it up, and as fast as possible copy the data you most need to another drive. In most cases when it works, I don't think it works more than two or three tries and those tries don't last more than fifteen to thirty minutes or so.

The one time I did this, I managed to get a few of the limited number of files that had been changed since the previous backup.

I have a cheap, toaster shaped dual drive adapter that works on USB and eSATA. They're pretty useful for jumping ship to a newer machine.

If it initially showed the XP loading screen then data must still be salvagable.

Did you set the correct drives as master/slave when you added the harddrive to the other PC. I vaguely remember two masters causing trouble when adding an extra harddrive to my PC, but I'm no expert on this stuff.

When a harddrive breaks I usually boot the machine from a Linux live USB-drive and use that to inspect the harddrive and recover any files I might need.

I have an old Iomega USB external hard drive that now fails to be detected.

Linux does not see it anywhere. Windows computers will give a dialogue box that says Device Malfunctioning.

I figure this thing is toast, or maybe the "Case" USB interface is bad and maybe a good HDD is still inside it. I'm wondering if I should just tear it open and see if the I could somehow put the drive inside a desktop computer.

Most likely the case or perhaps the drive does have some issues and that's causing the USB interface to fail. I've had this happen to an external drive too. Just had to take the actual harddrive out and put it in a PC and I was able to access it. Mine had a few bad sectors, but those only affected two pictures that were on the drive, the rest was fine.

This is bizarre...it's working again.

Software failed. This morning, I shoved the drive into another computer, with a functioning hard drive.

The blue chkdisk thing came up. Took 45 minutes to go through the drive I put in, about one minute to clear the existing hard drive.

And now it's working! Well, I haven't booted from it...there's no way I'm switching the computer off until EVERYTHING's backed up.

How could this happen? It was dead as, yesterday. I am delighted, over the parrot, etc.

The question is...could I trust this hard drive again?

The first thing I learned about hard drives when I got into this business almost 30 years ago hard drive failure is not a matter of if, but when.

Personally, after copying the data from the drive causing you trouble, I'd permanently retire that drive to your nearest friendly electronics recycler.

I go back to removable disk pack days. Hard drives the size of washing machines that weighed over 300lbs and had 10 MB of capacity.

Computer crash was literally a head crash into the disk platters with lots of aluminum filings, smoke and sometimes fire.



If your drive has anything of use to an identity thief on it, take an electric drill with a 1/4" bit and drill a few holes through it before parting with it. The recyclers "say" they destroy the drives, but a lot of times they end up being sold on the street in Nigeria.

I would not trust it again, but the honest truth is that it can easily be a data corruption issue that caused the symptoms that you saw, rather than any sort of physical problem with the drive. Bottom line is that if the hard drive is perfectly intact physically, but the computer doesn't write data to it correctly due to a software issue, or, say, the power went off while data was being written, then data on the drive can get out of sync and in effect your data can still be there but its no longer organized on the disk in such a way that the computer can retrieve it through normal means. That's why data recovery programs can sometimes work - they do more than Windows does when the data is corrupted - they scan the whole disk to try and extrapolate how the data has been misorganized and then reconstruct how it should be organized.

In any case, for future reference I would a) buy a new hard drive to replace this one and then b) buy a second drive to backup the new drive and c) get automated backup software - in the Mac World apple's Time Machine works well - there are similar for Windows though they don't come from Microsoft.

next time be extra careful. Copy all of your important data onto multiple formats like USB sticks, portable drives, cloud storage(such as dropbox, Tortoise SVN or mediafire) and DVDRs. Better safe than sorry.