Can you fix a broken hard drive?

[hackmole]

My Maxtor 60 gig hard drive is shot. It was acting up for several weeks - like the motor of the drive would just slow down and stop and the computer would shut off. Weird things like that. But then it seemed to work fine again with no problems until the big crash. It then deleted sectors on checkdisk when I restarted and then got stuck and wouldn't go any further. I should have backed stuff earlier but I didn't.

Now I'm looking for a way I can get this hard drive to work again so I can backup the things I need.

Is there any way I can temporarily fix the drive. It was my second drive. My nonboot drive. It was formatted in FAT with 4 or 5 partitions.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Are you sure it's the HDD and not the PSU?

 

[SickBeast]

You have a few options.

You could try the "freezer trick" whereby you put the hard drive in a ziplock bag, then put it in the freezer. Leave it there for a few hours to get nice and cold, then quickly take it out and put it back in your computer. You will have a few minutes until it warms up to get some data off of it.

Another thing you can do is to track down an identical drive, and swap your broken drive's platter into it. It's apparently complicated, but that's what the data recovery people will charge you $$$ to do.

 

[hackmole]

Yes, it's the hard drive because my bootup drive works fine and when I put in several different second (slave) drives they all worked fine, providing I would remember to remove the master jumper on the slave drives.

 

[hackmole]

Does the identical drive have to be exactly the same in storage size or can it be smaller. I have 3 or 4 Maxtor drives that are about 8 gigs but the one that broke is 60 gigs.

 

[hackmole]

I still think there might be some hope because bios recognizes the bad drive. At least it is doing that.

 

[Elixer]

If the data is very important, then stop messing around, and bite the bullet and pay some big $$$ for the experts to recover it. The more you mess around with it, the less & less chance you have of getting any data back.

Having said that, I did try the freezer trick, and it did work for me, however, the data wasn't *that* important...

For the board swap, it must be the exact same drive, same week made, same firmware, or it will not work. There are some exceptions to this, but usually, that is what you need.

 

[coolVariable]

For the board swap, it must be the exact same drive, same week made, same firmware, or it will not work. There are some exceptions to this, but usually, that is what you need.

It is almost impossible to get this though ...

 

[SickBeast]

It is almost impossible to get this though ...

I would say you could probably get away with flashing a drive to have the same firmware and it should work. I see no reason why the drives need to be manufactured in the same week. In some cases manufacturers upgrade dual platter drives to single platter over time, but aside from that I don't think it's necessary.

If the drive is the same make and model with the same rotational speed and the same number of platters, with the same firmware, it *should* work.

I would say look on ebay for an identical drive.

Even if you could get someone on here to let you borrow one that would work. Try posting the details of your drive on here and you might get lucky.

 

[SickBeast]

An idea I just had to enhance the freezer trick would be to use an external enclosure so that you don't have to wait for the computer to boot up before extracting your data from the drive.

 

[C1]

The few times people came to me with such a problem & requested me to help save their data, I found the best approach to be to run the drive as a slave (ie, secondary HDD). Dont try to boot from it ANY MORE! The steps are:

- Cease any attempts to boot from the HDD & minimize time on it.
- Immediately use suitable software & set the status of the HDD to non-bootable.
- Set the drive as slave & using a known good computer system, extract your data ASAP. Note: For a small 60GB HDD, I would first attempt an image. Chances are that will fail because the drive has areas which cannot be read, so the fall back is to just copy off what can be read.
- If you think cooling helps then buy a piece of dry ice to set on top of the HDD during the extraction/save process as that sometimes can take some time. All the big food stores carry dry ice just ask.

 

[Raduque]

If the drive is the same make and model with the same rotational speed and the same number of platters, with the same firmware, it *should* work.

I would say look on ebay for an identical drive.

Even if you could get someone on here to let you borrow one that would work. Try posting the details of your drive on here and you might get lucky.

I tried this once with a pair of Seagate 500gb drives, they were identical right down to the batch numbers and week code, and it didn't work. The bad drive with the good board would just spin up, go CRRRRK and spin down.

 

[SickBeast]

I tried this once with a pair of Seagate 500gb drives, they were identical right down to the batch numbers and week code, and it didn't work. The bad drive with the good board would just spin up, go CRRRRK and spin down.

*shrug*

Can't the platters actually be physically damaged if the head comes thrashing down on it?