HDD failure, is there something to try

konakona

Diamond Member
May 6, 2004
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Long story short, the HDD chocked while receiving a file from someone else, and started slowing the computer down like crazy. At first I suspected virus of some sort, but found nothing with 3 different online virus scans. It turns out the drive hooked up as primary slave was inaccessible from my computer. The icon for the drive was there and the device manager had it, but it took forever to hit right click on it and wouldnt run scandisk. BIOS detects it just fine, but it makes a very audible creeking noise during the bootup process. Having dealt with a few hdd failures, I am pretty positive it may be dead. With the HDD price falling through the floor each day, I am more sad about what was on the drive. Not like I would pay through my nose to recover data though, is there some inexpensive fix I could give a shot at? If everything attmept to recover data fails, I am gonna try low level formatting the drive.
 

DaiShan

Diamond Member
Jul 5, 2001
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If you can no longer access the drive there is no cheap and easy way to recover the data.
 

BadThad

Lifer
Feb 22, 2000
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Before you low level it, run the manufacturer's diag program on it. They can sometimes "repair" the drive to a state long enough to suck some data off it. Also, I've actually seen people make an image from a failing drive and recover most of the data...but that really depends on what's wrong with it.
 

Crucial

Diamond Member
Dec 21, 2000
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Stick the HD in the freezer for 24 hours and try it again. You would be suprised at how often this works. If it works have something ready to get the data off of it fast. Something like another HD not CD's or DVD's. I would do this before using the mfg's diagnostics on it.
 

psihog

Senior member
Sep 21, 2003
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Originally posted by: Crucial
Stick the HD in the freezer for 24 hours and try it again. You would be suprised at how often this works. If it works have something ready to get the data off of it fast. Something like another HD not CD's or DVD's. I would do this before using the mfg's diagnostics on it.

hehe, you're not joking. I've never heard of this before. many freezer hdd stories on google. it's the pet cemetery of hard drives.
 

darren1394

Junior Member
Feb 3, 2006
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i used a program called "get data back" from www.runtime.org when my drive got corrupted and was unreadable in windows, in worked great.

If u can see the drive in the bios then this should work. Set the damaged drive as a slave and it builds a directory list and recovers most data, and can search for "lost files" as well. then u can copy them to the primary drive.

There is also a free program called PC inspector u might try www.pcinspector.de
 

konakona

Diamond Member
May 6, 2004
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darren1394, I really appreciate your post. If both programs fail, then I will give a shot at the freezing thing (is it for real?)
 

konakona

Diamond Member
May 6, 2004
6,285
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just realized the OBCD also had a NTFS image recovery tool. getdataback did the trick tho, thanks for a great tip :thumbsup: