Hard drive squealed, crackled and now my PC won't boot.

[SNJ]

Working on an old PC, using a (i think)Hitachi hard drive. Switched it on after being switched off for over 2 months. It booted fine, got stuck at the BIOS screen, where it detects drives. Couldn't detect them. I turned it off, started it up again. PC got past the first BIOS screen, then gave a message saying boot disk failure. I rearranged the SATA cables, reset the BIOS by reseating the CMOS battery. Powered it up again. This time, heard a rattling and squealing sound from the drive. Scared, I cut power and haven't touched it yet.

Pretty sure the hard drive is dead. What do you guys think? Any way of recovering my data?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Working on an old PC, using a (i think)Hitachi hard drive. Switched it on after being switched off for over 2 months. It booted fine, got stuck at the BIOS screen, where it detects drives. Couldn't detect them. I turned it off, started it up again. PC got past the first BIOS screen, then gave a message saying boot disk failure. I rearranged the SATA cables, reset the BIOS by reseating the CMOS battery. Powered it up again. This time, heard a rattling and squealing sound from the drive. Scared, I cut power and haven't touched it yet.

Pretty sure the hard drive is dead. What do you guys think? Any way of recovering my data?

Pretty much 0 chance. If it's not a normal sound from a HD, it usually means it fragged itself. Once you get to the point of a head touching a platter (this sounds like half the internals touched the platter) you need serious no-shit forensics to recover data, which is $$$$$$.

 

[C1]

Sounds like the platter bearing (usually a liquid system) has gone bad.

Get a new drive at Frys Electronics (probably need to go with a Seagate) and see what you can transfer (if any) from the bad drive.

 

[mnewsham]

If you have data on there worth real money ( for example lets say you have a bitcoin wallet that hasn't been backed up anywhere else and has $1000's of worth of bitcoins on this HDD), you could spend real money having a professional data recovery service attempt to read the data directly from the platters to salvage what they can. But you'd be spending easily several hundred dollars, and depending on what needs to be done to recover the data, several thousand dollars.

 

[SNJ]

Thanks for the responses. The data isn't "important", its just a collection of music and movies built up over many years, and some of those movies are hard to come by(think oldies from the 40s and 50s). There won't be any money lost, just some old people who'll be saddened by the fact that they can't watch their favorite flicks anymore.

 

[Burpo]

Drop it in a zip lock bag and place it in the freezer over night. Plug it in the morning after & have a drive ready to copy to. In case it spins up again quickly get as much off as possible. Costs nothing to try & it's worked for me a few times (when it was just bad bearings).

 

[ronbo613]

Drop it in a zip lock bag and place it in the freezer over night. Plug it in the morning after & have a drive ready to copy to. In case it spins up again quickly get as much off as possible. Costs nothing to try & it's worked for me a few times (when it was just bad bearings).

I've done this a few times and it's worked about half the time. Worth a shot and you have nothing to lose. Be prepared to work fast because as the drive warms up, usually fairly quickly, you'll probably hear those noises again before the drive fails. Do the freezer routine as many times as you can before the drive attains nirvana.

Back up those files.

 

[Hugo Drax]

you can try putting in 1 or two drops inside the center platter shaft. what you would do is open the HD inside a large ziplock bag to prevent dust from entering, then reseal it and see if the bearings will unsieze.