Hard Drive recovery

wolf8218

Junior Member
Apr 24, 2005
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hello i have a damaged hard drive it is IDE 61.5 GB IBM Deskstar.
I have vital information (porn, games, schoolwork, backups) there and i need to restore it. anyone have the info of a good recovery company?
 

ChefJoe

Platinum Member
Jan 5, 2002
2,506
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Deskstars are old with known reliability issues (enough so that many people have been prophylactically selling them from their computer before failure occurs). There are recovery companies that you can find on google but you're likely to pay many hundreds of dollars to recover data from the most common deskstar failure (click of death is mechanical rather than the much more salvagable writing surface/file system error) as they have to physically manipulate the innards of the drive. Please state how much you're willing to spend on this valuable stuff before expecting help.
 

wolf8218

Junior Member
Apr 24, 2005
21
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im willing to spend 100-120 dollars. its pretty private info also. dont want them snooping around my MP3s.
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
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Probably not going to happen for that price. Services cater to business clients and charge $100-200 per hour with a high minimum.
 

UsandThem

Elite Member
May 4, 2000
16,068
7,383
146
Originally posted by: wolf8218
im willing to spend 100-120 dollars. its pretty private info also. dont want them snooping around my porn collection.

Fixed it for you;)

 

wchou

Banned
Dec 1, 2004
1,137
0
0
Originally posted by: wolf8218
im willing to spend 100-120 dollars. its pretty private info also. dont want them snooping around my MP3s.

you should have obught 250gb for that much and replace this crap but you're going to have to pay much more then that plus keep that junk fo yours

 

ok its me.


I got the BIOS to recognize the drive, correct model number. but it only recognizes 33.something GB of the drive. plus when i boot up windows it freezes windows because it probably cannot read the drive. any helpful ideas? ive been given the suggestion to use Norton Ghost to recover whatever data might still be left on here. Is this a good idea?
 

Hello? is anyone here? I got windows to recognize the disk. it doesnt recognize all of it (only 33GB) but its there. i dont want to format it in case theres some way to recover SOME files.

please reply ASAP
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
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Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
These might help (Advanced Search > "hard drive recovery")

recovering from crashed

laptop hdd died

hitachi drive died

(click the Advanced Search link if you want more)

Yay, my thread got linked to. :D

Deskstars are old with known reliability issues

And new ones too - the Deskstars that failed on me were 120GXP and 180GXP drives. Supposedly, only the 60GXP and 75GXP's were affected by the click of death. While the 120GXP died of a head crash, the 180GXP made the familiar click-bonk sound from the infamous click of death.


What kind of death are we talking about for your drive? Bad sectors, not detecting, what?
 

wolf8218

Junior Member
Apr 24, 2005
21
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0
well my drive was part of a firewire external drive from ACOM. it stopped working so i took it out to do some diagnostics with the ide channel. post errors kept saying bad disk bla bla. i turned autospin off and it started working (detected by the computer). but its only detected up to 33.8 GB and has to be formatted to be able to be read in windows. i dont want to do this in case theres any way for it to be fixed/recovered.
 

shoRunner

Platinum Member
Nov 8, 2004
2,629
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formatting will no effect the ability to recover data if your using a data recovery program. usually it helps

i used getdataback, it has worked quite well.
 

FlyLice

Banned
Jan 19, 2005
1,680
1
0
Originally posted by: ChefJoe
Deskstars are old with known reliability issues (enough so that many people have been prophylactically selling them from their computer before failure occurs). There are recovery companies that you can find on google but you're likely to pay many hundreds of dollars to recover data from the most common deskstar failure (click of death is mechanical rather than the much more salvagable writing surface/file system error) as they have to physically manipulate the innards of the drive. Please state how much you're willing to spend on this valuable stuff before expecting help.

big words you be using
 

wolf8218

Junior Member
Apr 24, 2005
21
0
0
You know what? I was using the 32 Gb limit. DOH!
OK so i deleted the MBR and noooooow it shows as 60 GB.
but it doesnt show any data! in windows (computer managment) it says that it has 60 GB and 60 GB free. how oh HOW can i fix this hmmm?
 

ChefJoe

Platinum Member
Jan 5, 2002
2,506
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Umm, so your drive used to be hooked up to a firewire-to-ide converter chipset ? I'm not sure how well those chipsets work... it's been a known issue with software based raid controllers that many of them use chipsets where the drive works fine with that controller but you can't just carry the drive to another computer's raid controller card and expect it to work. I wonder if the converter chipsets have the same issue.....


why did you take it out of that external case ? what prevents you from buying that exact same type of enclosure and then putting the drive in the new one (before you mess with the mbr, etc..... oops, too late).

[edit] the most common deskstar problems appear to be related to thermal expansion causing the loss of tracking and/or head crashes into the surface. I'm not sure IBM ever laid out exactly what they were finding in all their RMAs and it was left to internet geeks to discuss and try to figure out. I heard one story where a chip on the breadboard was overheating and someone was able to fix their drive by cooling the chip with an "ice in a can" product and then transplanted circuit boards from a working drive into a non-working one.... it made it work but the starting head positions were off and they couldn't recover their data. Common Deskstar problems seemed to be largely physical and not something software can recover from.
 

wolf8218

Junior Member
Apr 24, 2005
21
0
0
the drive didnt work in the enclosure. one night it worked. the next time i turned it on, ewps. no more hard drive. ive recovered about 1/3rd of the info on the drive with getdataback so far. (well i havent burned it yet) the rest, sadly, is lost or undreadable.
 

wolf8218

Junior Member
Apr 24, 2005
21
0
0
i havent deleted or touched anything so far ive just enabled the partition in the computer managment options. its not formatted. can you show me how to cure the most "common" deskstar errors u mentioned earlier?
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
19
81
First, go to the System Restore section of My Computer (right-click, Properties), and turn it off. That'll keep any more data from writing to the drive.
Next, get the R-studio demo, and let it scan the drive. Try to let it recover a few small files (under 64KB, as that's the demo's limitation) from various folders. If they are intact, pay for the full version, and begin extracting your data from the drive.