tookthetrain
Junior Member
Hello Folks,
I got a question, but first a story
On Friday morning, I experienced what I believe is the click of death on an 18 month old WD 320gb IDE hard drive. The drive has been in a usb enclosure the whole time I had it, and never had any problems until now. This time, when I hooked it up to my laptop, the drive spun up, then I heard 6 fairly loud clicks at a constant interval, after which the drive went silent (no spinning). This happened a number of times. So I took the drive out of the enclosure, and connected directly to my m/b and power supply and the same thing happened. I figured I was screwed, and lost all my data. It was mostly media files and stuff, but I don't want to part with it. I heard about the hard drive freezing trick, so I said what the heck and tossed my drive in a Ziploc right next to the tv dinners. On Saturday morning, I took the drive out, and tried to hook it up immediately. Nothing changed. The drive clicked like it had been doing and stopped spinning. So at this point, I had pretty much had given up completely.
Now the crazy part: Saturday afternoon. I power up the hard drive just for kicks. It clicks but much quiter this time, and only twice, and then I hear the hard drive start spinning. WTH! 😕 I shut down my pc , and connect the drive to the m/b -> reboot, and then the damn thing works and gets recognized by XP. So I only expect it to work for top 15 minutes. So I run some quick ls commands to at least get a list of all the files I'd probably lose. After that I started transferring as much to another hard drive as I possibly could. To my surprise, I was able to transfer everything off the 105gb (second partition), which took about 1-1/2 hours, and the drive just kept right on spinning. For the first partition (200gb), however, this was not the case. When transferring files, it seems to work ok at first but then after a few minutes, I get an I/O error in XP. I was only able to transfer ~2.5/200gb . So on Saturday night, I got a copy of Spinrite, run in Level 2; I've been running it for 15 hours now, and yes the drive is still spinning. Crazy I know! The problem is that it has only analyzed 2% of the hard disk, and it already shows quite a few unrecoverable portions on the hard drive. It's projecting 350 hours until it finishes. I looked at the Spinrite log and it really just seems to just be hanging. The same error over and over. Will it really take 15 days?
Anyway, my question: Is there anything else I can do to salvage the data? Can I rearrange the partitions, and use some application (???) that could move the files from the corrupt sectors of the hard drive to the ones that are in working order? Has anyone run into something like this?
Sidenote: I don't understand the science behind the freeze->cool down phenomenon on hard disks, but from all other accounts I've read it should only work for about 15 minutes before the drive dies again. I've been running the drive for a whole day now. I'm pretty ecstatic that I was able to get anything at all. I had pretty much counted the data for dead. If you have a failing hard drive, it's definitely worth a try.
Anyway, thanks for any help. Sorry I know this isn't very concise.
I got a question, but first a story
On Friday morning, I experienced what I believe is the click of death on an 18 month old WD 320gb IDE hard drive. The drive has been in a usb enclosure the whole time I had it, and never had any problems until now. This time, when I hooked it up to my laptop, the drive spun up, then I heard 6 fairly loud clicks at a constant interval, after which the drive went silent (no spinning). This happened a number of times. So I took the drive out of the enclosure, and connected directly to my m/b and power supply and the same thing happened. I figured I was screwed, and lost all my data. It was mostly media files and stuff, but I don't want to part with it. I heard about the hard drive freezing trick, so I said what the heck and tossed my drive in a Ziploc right next to the tv dinners. On Saturday morning, I took the drive out, and tried to hook it up immediately. Nothing changed. The drive clicked like it had been doing and stopped spinning. So at this point, I had pretty much had given up completely.
Now the crazy part: Saturday afternoon. I power up the hard drive just for kicks. It clicks but much quiter this time, and only twice, and then I hear the hard drive start spinning. WTH! 😕 I shut down my pc , and connect the drive to the m/b -> reboot, and then the damn thing works and gets recognized by XP. So I only expect it to work for top 15 minutes. So I run some quick ls commands to at least get a list of all the files I'd probably lose. After that I started transferring as much to another hard drive as I possibly could. To my surprise, I was able to transfer everything off the 105gb (second partition), which took about 1-1/2 hours, and the drive just kept right on spinning. For the first partition (200gb), however, this was not the case. When transferring files, it seems to work ok at first but then after a few minutes, I get an I/O error in XP. I was only able to transfer ~2.5/200gb . So on Saturday night, I got a copy of Spinrite, run in Level 2; I've been running it for 15 hours now, and yes the drive is still spinning. Crazy I know! The problem is that it has only analyzed 2% of the hard disk, and it already shows quite a few unrecoverable portions on the hard drive. It's projecting 350 hours until it finishes. I looked at the Spinrite log and it really just seems to just be hanging. The same error over and over. Will it really take 15 days?
Anyway, my question: Is there anything else I can do to salvage the data? Can I rearrange the partitions, and use some application (???) that could move the files from the corrupt sectors of the hard drive to the ones that are in working order? Has anyone run into something like this?
Sidenote: I don't understand the science behind the freeze->cool down phenomenon on hard disks, but from all other accounts I've read it should only work for about 15 minutes before the drive dies again. I've been running the drive for a whole day now. I'm pretty ecstatic that I was able to get anything at all. I had pretty much counted the data for dead. If you have a failing hard drive, it's definitely worth a try.
Anyway, thanks for any help. Sorry I know this isn't very concise.
