Couldn't initialize laptop IDE hard drive

[mobobuff]

SHORT AND SWEET EXPLANATION
Failed Apple laptop hard drive not initialized and failed to intialize... is it unrecoverably dead?

DETAILED EXPLANATION

1. A friend accidentally knocked his G4 PowerBook off of his nightstand in his sleep (the nightstand isn't that tall, so it wasn't too terrible of a fall). The next morning he tries to start it and gets a flashing question mark and funny yet quiet noises coming from the hard drive.

2. He goes to some place and they tell him a thousand dollars or something to fix it because it's totalled, I crap a brick and tell him that I'll have a look at it for free.

3. The laptop is completely fine and only the hard drive is rattled useless.

4. I purchase a 44-to-40 pin IDE hard drive converter to try to read the drive with my system and back up his very important information he wanted back (Quicken accounting info and his college papers (Masters' thesis and whatnot)). While waiting for the converter to arive I let the drive sit undisturbed in the freezer for 42 hours.

5. Once it arrived I tested the converter with an old formatted and still-containing-files laptop hard drive of mine, worked flawlessly.

6. Took friend's hard drive out of the freezer and immediately swapped it, started up, and it was not recognized (I expected as much) and in Disk Management it is there, but it says "Not initialized". So I tell it to initialize and I get the error "An unexpected error has occured. Check the System Event Log for more information on the error. Close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer."

System log said, "Unspecified error (80004005).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at bla bla bla "

So, what's your take on this? Is the drive perpetually and unrecoverably dead? Or is there something else I need or can do to just get some files off of it? It doesn't make any retchedly loud noises when trying to be read. It's an IBM Travelstar 60G and even though Apple filesystems don't read well on Windows machines, I figured it would still work with me more than this (unless of course it was truly dead).

I wanna be able to tell this guy that I can get these files back for him, but I'm losing hope.

Thanks for putting up with my long-windedness.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Sounds like the drive has had a hardware (mechical sp?) failure. Prolly your only option is going to be a data recovery service and thats not gonna be cheap.

 

[SickBeast]

Why not put the hard drive into a USB/firewire enclosure and hook it up to a Mac? That way you would eliminate the potential for a software incompatibility.

BTW, you didn't format it, did you? Because that would complicate matters.

 

[mobobuff]

Yeah I thought about hooking it up to a Mac but I don't have access to one right now, I'll try getting at one soon.

No, not only am I unable to format it (has to be initialized first) but I definitely wouldn't have if I could, that would ruin the whole point.

I figured a DR service would be the last option, and I don't even know if the files are that important to him to pay that much.

 

[SickBeast]

Aren't "initializing" and "formatting" the same thing? Be careful there.

You shouldn't have to "initialize" anything, you should plug it in and it should work just fine.

I would seriously do the USB enclosure thing, they're only like $20 IIRC.

 

[vegetation]

Send it off to a data recovery center. If this guy didn't have his masters thesis backed up and it was nearly completed, then trust me, he's going to pay anything to get it back.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: vegetation
Send it off to a data recovery center. If this guy didn't have his masters thesis backed up and it was nearly completed, then trust me, he's going to pay anything to get it back.

I heartily concur. Btw, was the "Freezer trick" the first thing that was tried? That's most often referred to as the "last resort", not the first, and generally not a good idea to do, if you plan to send it to a pro data-recovery place in the future anyways.

I'm also curious about this "initialize" stuff. That sounds like Apple OS terminology to me. Yet, this was mentioned in the context of being hooked up to a Windows' machine. Am I missing something here?

It sounds to me like a synonym for "format", and that sounds like the last thing one should do in this case.

Have you (the OP) tried to use Norton Ghost from a DOS bootable diskette, and use a "raw" disk copy onto another drive? (If you plan to send the drive away for professionally recovery, you might want to skip this and just send to to them. If the drive is in fact mechanically-damaged in any way, further usage could damage it more.)

Btw, considering how "at-risk" data on a laptop HD is, as compared to a desktop (consider theft of the entire laptop as an additional risk), and considering the value of the data on the drive, how could this person not have some sort of seperate backup?

(Why do people pay money for car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, but not data insurance? Compared to the other three, it's quite cheap! At least in terms of money. In terms of time, it is more costly, but only slightly.)

 

[mobobuff]

He might have some slightly dated saves on his home computer, I didn't really get all of the details (and half of them I got through his girlfriend). When I asked him on the phone what files he really needed the most, he mentioned the Quicken data files first, which leads me to believe that he in fact did save his college papers somewhere else. I'll need to confer with him more and tell him about DR possiblities and costs, and if it's not important enough to him to pay the money (his mother and father are both highly paid doctors, so he may just pay the DR fees). He already said he'd pay for whatever I needed to do to get it running again, so I'll just buy another 60G 2.5" hd, or bigger if he wants more space, and throw it in there.

When I placed it in the freezer I had it inside an anti-static bag and a zip-lock, both securely vacuumed with an actual vacuum. When I removed it there were no signs of condensation, it was just extremely cold. When it was hooked up I could feel it spinning inside, and it was making none of the noises that it was inside the laptop. Still, Disk Management said "Not initialized" and the 55.88G were labeled as Unallocated (but I figured it would see the volumes if it was "initialized" which I didn't figure to mean the same thing as formatted.)

If he decides not to go the DR route, I'll try that raw-data disk copy that you mentioned.

 

[imported_raybay]

The drive is dead for normal purposes, but you can download several different software recovery packages ranging from $40 to $80 that will help extract the data to another drive. It is best to use an adapter to enable you to put it in a desktop. Cost: $3.00 to $10.00. Then you can copy the data to a partition of a desktop hard drive where you can analyze and repair it as you go.

If the data is valuable, there are several great recovery firms that will rescue the data. But your will find they are astonishingly expensive, running from about $400 to $1,500. Still, they do the best job on data that is precious. Suggest you only deal with those who do not charge you until they give you a report on what they can do. Some companies are stoopid, and will ruin the hard drive so nobody else can recover it. So use only highly reputable firms you can talk to....

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: mobobuff
He might have some slightly dated saves on his home computer, I didn't really get all of the details (and half of them I got through his girlfriend). When I asked him on the phone what files he really needed the most, he mentioned the Quicken data files first, which leads me to believe that he in fact did save his college papers somewhere else. I'll need to confer with him more and tell him about DR possiblities and costs, and if it's not important enough to him to pay the money (his mother and father are both highly paid doctors, so he may just pay the DR fees). He already said he'd pay for whatever I needed to do to get it running again, so I'll just buy another 60G 2.5" hd, or bigger if he wants more space, and throw it in there.

When I placed it in the freezer I had it inside an anti-static bag and a zip-lock, both securely vacuumed with an actual vacuum. When I removed it there were no signs of condensation, it was just extremely cold. When it was hooked up I could feel it spinning inside, and it was making none of the noises that it was inside the laptop. Still, Disk Management said "Not initialized" and the 55.88G were labeled as Unallocated (but I figured it would see the volumes if it was "initialized" which I didn't figure to mean the same thing as formatted.)

If he decides not to go the DR route, I'll try that raw-data disk copy that you mentioned.

Ok, so you did the "Freezer trick", and the Windows' system physically recognized the drive (it spun up properly) - so why didn't you do the raw copy right then using Ghost (or Linux)? Why did you do the freezer trick in the first place, without a second "working copy" HD available to use?

And, what filesystem does it use? (I haven't touched Macs in quite some time.) I wouldn't think that Windows' would be able to read that anyways, so your best bet would be to make a "raw copy" to another HD, and take that HD to another Mac running data-recovery software to read it, or perhaps use some specialized data-recovery for PC that can understand Mac filesystems. (Is there such a thing? There might be, I suppose.)

About that "initialize" thing, maybe it is talking about whether a "disk signature" has been allowed to be written to the disk by Windows' Disk Management console. If it's a Mac-formatted HD, then you definately DONT want to do that.

I have a brand-new, never partitioned/formatted, 250GB Maxtor drive that I just installed into my W2K SP2 machine. Disk Management shows it as "Disk 2 / Unknown / 233.76 GB / Online", and in the actual disk-space picture, it shows "233.76 GB / Unallocated".

My other partitioned/formatted disks show up as "Basic" instead of "Unknown", and "Healthy" instead of "Unallocated".

I don't see any "Not initialized". I'm curious what part of Disk Management is showing you that, because I've never seen that before.