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Hard Drive dead? Can I recover anything!?

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Hi Guys,

I could really do with some help here! 🙁 My hard drive appears to have died. I am slightly lucky in that it is my secondary hard drive which contains most of my media, documents, etc.. therefore I can still boot into Windows and actually use the internet, ms office, etc.. (as this sits on my main hard drive)

I get that SMART error thing at BIOS start up, but press F2 to continue. I've tried to copy a few files over to external hard drives and usb sticks but most of the time it doesn't work - especially the larger files. Is there anything I can do to at least partially mend this hard drive so I can recover the almost 300GB's worth of data!? This is quite distressing. I'm assuming I would still have to go out a buy another large hard drive as I don't have any 3rd party storage big enough to copy the stuff across to, even if I could

On HD Tune, it shows the following:

(05) Reallocated Sector Count - Current; 1 - Worst; 1 - Threshold; 140 - Data; 10631 - Status ;Failed
All the other statements seem to say "ok"
 
I'm curious. Did S.M.A.R.T. give you warnings BEFORE the drive failed?

You could try "GetDataBack", which is pretty good at reading failing drives. You are going to need an external drive. I'd suggest a 500GB USB drive. They are about $100 now. After you fix your current problem, use the USB drive to keep periodic backups of your important data.
 
Actually, my computer was in general doing strange things before I got any SMART warning. Now that I stay off trying to access anything on the "dodgy" drive my pc seems more stable. The SMART message is now pretty consistent at boot up.

Wow, only $100 for 500GB? Which one would u suggest - and do you suggest I go this route rather than another internal drive (my main preference over internal is easy access and more secure (someone can't easily walk off with it))

Thanks Rebate.
 
My suggestion was to use a 500 GB external drive as a BACKUP drive. Keep this drive disconnected and someplace safe except while making periodic backups.
 
Cheers, is there any advantage over a standalone external USB 2.0 hard drive and an internal drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure?
 
http://www.pcworld.com/article...68-page,1/article.html
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.html
your drive is most likely perma dead.
yes hd's are cheap these days, both usb and internal. the drives in usb enclosures are regular drives. there is no difference. only difference is how well the drive enclosure cools and what drive is inside, some are hotter than others. seagate freeagent drives are the only ones with 5 year warrantys. usb is definetly slower than internal drives though. well as you've learned, never trust data to a single drive. sync back is some freesoftware for synchronizing some of your more important folders over a second drive. well the advantage of external is that you can quickly disconnect it, if you need to always access the thing its better to get an internal drive. usb2.0 drives these days are like easy backup, much simpler than burning 500gb of dvds for instance. but if you don't feel like buying both an internal and external drive just get the internal and make sure to keep redundant copies of stuff.
 
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