Hard Drive Crash, what do you think?

[Mayfriday0529]

My Secondary drive crashed last night and wanted to hear some opinions about it?

I have mostly lots of pictures on it and PDF documents that I scanned, those are my most important items, but last time I backup was about a month ago. There is not much of a difference since its last update except for some new Pictures that I took.

Should I try to get it service by one of those recovery companies? Anyone done that and how much did you pay? The amount of data is probably less than 1 gig.

Should I take the loss and if I do, how can I make sure none of the data is access by anyone else if I toss it in the trash.


Just for a little background on what happen.
I have a 120 gig primary drive and 40 gig slave drive. The 40 gig all sudden made some noise and windows started showing error boxes about writing to disk. I shutdown and try to restart the system would not restart. It would give an error like a floppy was inserted on boot up. I disconnected the Slave drive and the system would boot, once I plugged the slave back on it would not boot up, also trying the slave drive alone I got the message "disk failure"

If it is a head crash I probably messed it up more each time I try to restart it.

 

[asm0deus]

you could try the freezer trick,

put the drive in a zip loc bag then put it in the freezer for a while (its supposed to cause some kind of contraction or expansion of the metal and helps it do it's thing) wait a while and try recovering data, it shouldnt hurt the drive anymore than it is, google should turn up something try a search for hard drive freezer. theres some software i thought that could recover data too, someone else might know what its called.

 

[Mayfriday0529]

Nice tip, found this webpage about it
link

its interesting.

Edit: I'm going to try it this weekend, i'm very hopefull that maybe it will work.

 

[thorin]

As mentioned the freezer trick does work, HOWEVER before you try that you may want to see if any of your friends/family have the same drive and try swapping the controller boards (on the drive) first. It's an easy change just be gentle to all the parts. If switching the boards doesn't work then put your original board back on it and try the freezer.

More info here:
200 Ways to Revive a Hard Drive
If you don't have a Tech Republic account use:
UID: at2001@my.net
PASS: at2001

Thorin

 

[Mayfriday0529]

Originally posted by: thorin
As mentioned the freezer trick does work, HOWEVER before you try that you may want to see if any of your friends/family have the same drive and try swapping the controller boards (on the drive) first. It's an easy change just be gentle to all the parts. If switching the boards doesn't work then put your original board back on it and try the freezer.

More info here:
200 Ways to Revive a Hard Drive
If you don't have a Tech Republic account use:
UID: at2001@my.net
PASS: at2001

Thorin

None of my friends or family have the same hard drive, i can say that right away.

 

[CraigRT]

I would not recommend data recovery unless you REALLY need that stuff.

they are not cheap...

 

[Mayfriday0529]

Originally posted by: CraigRT
I would not recommend data recovery unless you REALLY need that stuff.

they are not cheap...

yeah i'm not going to do it, i'm going to try the freezer option and if it doesnt work i will remember to always back up.

I still have the following question.
if i cant get the data off it, how can i make sure no one can get there hands on it if i toss the hard drive away.

 

[Mayfriday0529]

I put the drive in the freezer overnight and it worked. the unit is running at the moment, i transfer all its files over to another drive and now using a disk utility to write 0's to it so i can toss it when its done.

 

[Mayfriday0529]

Bump

i just wanted to bump this so anyone interested in the Freezing result could read that yes it works.

 

[Epsil0n00]

That is awesome that the freezer trick worked! I have tried this on many drives and just had my first success story this past week... many was I excited to see that the myth was true!!! It doesn't seem to work most of the time, but when it does it is glorious!

glad you got your data!
Epsil0n