Hard disk failed

[gxsaurav]

My Smasung harddisk has failed, i m an animator by profession & all my 3 year work is in it....

last night, when i was working all of a sudden the computer hanged...& rebooted..then the BIOS Says "No boot media found" & doesn't detect my harddisk at all

i replugged the harddisk...& although i got the WIndows boot screen.....but then a BSD, after which it again booted on it's own & there was some strange scratching sound....so i immdeatily closed the PC

i don't care if the HD is gone...i baught a new one....but the data in it is important, how to recover that...this was a 3 years old harddisk. help wanted ASAP

 

[chusteczka]

It seems the BIOS is recognizing the hard drive, this is good. There are a few actions that can be taken to attempt data recovery.

• the new hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility
• rescue CD (Live CD)
• create a disk image using a disk imaging application
• data recovery program

Each of these can be used to copy the data from the failing drive to your new drive. These options are listed in preference.

[*]Hard Drive Manufacturer Diagnostic Utilities[/u]

• Seagate
• Samsung
• Western Digital
• Maxtor
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi

[*]OEM Support Sites[/u]

• Acer
• Asus
• Averatec
• Compaq Support
• Dell Product Support
• Dell 32-bit Diagnostics v1257
• eMachine
• Fujitsu
• Gateway
• Hewlett-Packard
• Lenovo
• Panasonic
• Sharp
• Sony
• Toshiba Support: (Computer Systems & Digital Products) or (Storage Devices)

[*]Rescue Disks[/u]

• UBCD4Win
• BartPE
• Insert
• Knoppix
• Hiren's BootCD
• Ubuntu LiveCD

[*]Data Recovery Programs[/u]

• TestDisk
• R-Studio
• Runtime's GetDataBack
• Spinright
• Ontrack's Easy Recovery Pro
• Quetek
• File Scavenger
• HDD Regenerator
• Freeware Data Recovery Tools ***Free***
• Freeware Restoration ***Free***
• PC Inspector ***Free***
• Smart NTFS Recovery***Free***
• Smart FAT Recovery***Free***
• ACR Data Recovery
• DataRecoveryWizard
• Recover My Files
• Handy Recovery
• Digital Camera Memory Recovery: PC Inspector
• BadCopy Media Recovery

 

[0roo0roo]

nice post chusteczka

course if its mechanically borked no software willl help. professional data recovery where they rip it open costs lots of money.
i swear raid 1 should be standard for off the shelf computer systems.... drives die. its like russian roulette.

anyways maybe it just can't boot, plug it in as slave on another pc and see if u can access it.

 

[gxsaurav]

i connected the harddisk to a friends computer & it detected it, i was able to make backup of everything, right now...i got a new HD, & since it's a samsung HD, i m now gonna run the HUTIL file, to see if there is a problem with the HD or the motherboard controller is malfunctioning

now there is one thing i wanted to ask...since i got the new HD 120 GB, I made a 10 GB partition in it, is there any way i can simply mirror the old HD C:\ drive to the new HD c:\ drive, including boot record MBR etc...so that i don't need to reinstall windows

 

[chusteczka]

That is the best result that could have been. Congratulations on saving your data and following through with drive diagnostics to see what may be wrong.

 

[treskin]

In the future if all else fails I recommend a program called SpinRite, it works miracles. If it's a mechanical problem you can also read up on freezing your hard drive - supposedly it tends to allow a hard drive to work long enough to pull the data off.

 

[0roo0roo]

with software like ghost or partition magic its possible to copy a partition over to another one yes.

 

[RebateMonger]

So, have you picked up an external USB drive yet to make ongoing backups from now on?

Based on my own experience, I'd put the odds of having a hard drive failure at about 1-in-10 over a three year period.

 

[gxsaurav]

partition magic....hmm, let me check, if it can copy one partition to another HD

all the data recovery is complete....i was a just going to reinstall windows on the new HD

 

[jackschmittusa]

Two kinds of people in the world: those that back up, and those that wish they did.