How to save crashed hard drive?

[ceLLriOT]

Does anyone know how I can save the data on my hard drive?? I am willing to pay up to 100 dollars to get this done as long as I know I can save at least some of it. The hard drive was bought less than three weeks ago and it started making a clunking noise. Now I can view anything on the drive, it detects in the bios, but if I try to retrieve any information off the drive, winXP locks up. Help me???

 

[Need4Speed]

install winxp on another drive and set that one up as the slave, then u might get lucky and be able to pull some of the data off.

 

[KingofFah]

Is the freezer trick an option with the newer hard drivers? If you cannot retrieve anything when you make it a slave in another system, then you could try that.
3 weeks? There should be some kind of data recovery warranty for something like that, but then again the world is no where near perfect.

 

[Theslowone]

If its been making noises then quit then there is little hope with trying to get it off yourself, worth a shot but probably not going to happen. And the cheapest place I found sucks and they start at 300.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

indeed the clunking noise is the magneto servo either slamming the actuator to one side or the other w/too much force, a bad spot on the media(usually a distinct tick,tick,tick) or a head crash. aren't you glad you make constant and persistant nightly backups

 

[ianbergman]

It's worth a try to make the drive a slave and use data-recovery tools like ERD Commander. There's a slim hope, but in truth you'll probably need a data-recovery house and then you're talking $500, bare minimum, probably a lot more.

 

[runzwithsizorz]

I was able to retrieve my data just last week in this same scenario, search " file recovery?" or MAYBE follow Kongniques'
thread. you of coarse will need a good HD set up and ready to go, and set as master to the bad one.

 

[RayH]

One other option is if you have another drive of the same model you can try swapping the controller boards on the drives but this only works if it's a problem with the controller board. I did this once with a bad drive to pull data off before sending it back for replacement.