Maxtor HDD died

[mentalcrisis00]

Hey all

My sister bought a 150GB Maxtor IDE drive awhile back (I told her to get a WD but she never listens), anyways as I suspected it failed. Started getting insanely loud and she would let me replace it, then one day is came to the windows load screen and bam BSOD. She has something like 12GB of family photos on there that need to be pulled off. I've tried running it in same mode, opening the files with an external hard drive, setting it up as a slave, and in a last ditch effort I tried windows repair which failed. It won't auto detect when it's a slave or when it's inside an external HDD so I imagine the hardware has failed somehow.

What I'm wondering is if someone knows of a recovery program or some other way that might allow me to pull the pictures off it? I've been looking around at computer repair places and they estimate something like 50 bucks an hour to get the data. I'd rather do it myself and save over 100 bucks.

I have Western Digital HDD's that are still running strong after 5 years, I've never had much luck with maxtors. I've only owned 1 and it was a 5GB in one of my first builds a long time ago.

I'm willing to try anything at this point

 

[Lorne]

Try photorescue, If your lucky you can find certain demo's that can be tricked into letting you copy the photos it finds, Or just get a legal version, Im using it alot to recover an alotment of images and other files from memorycards to corrupted HD's.
You have to at least get the system to know there is some sort of unit there, It wont mount drives, But you can get it to read on the bit lvl if its drasticly corrupted.
It will even allow assembly of crossthatched images before saving.
Ive even used it to recover a huge library of MP3's but the drive was so bad that It saved the files with no extention, I did a mass rename and tested and moved the good ones and renamed again for wav, Avi and Mov files.

 

[n7]

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

Use this every few days...it's very decent.

Keep in mind that if it's completely dead & isn't even spinning up, this won't help.

But if it doesn't show up in Windows, or perhaps is just showing in disk management, etc, it'll have a shot.

 

[mentalcrisis00]

There's a place in my area that actually takes the data disc and buffer out of the casing and they put it in a machine that pulls the data off. They said if the drive isn't damaged they can delete the operating system, while leaving the data files and turn it into an external HDD or write the info to dvd. The windows xp load screen does appear but then goes to a blue screen, they said thats a good sign because it means that it's spinning up and it's probably a data corruption with the OS. But seeming the drive won't recognize as a slave or external it makes me think that the drive hardware failed in some way.

Anyhow they told me they charge by the GB, so 5GB would be $100 and 10GB would be $140. The GetDataBack looks nice but $79 is a little steep and I rarely have a drive fail on me, and I always back up my data to dvd. My sis only has like 2GB of data on their so for a one time thing it's not bad, but my data pool is something like 500GB and I imagine I'd buy the program at that point.

thanks for the suggestions I'll check out the trial for GDB

 

[jdkick]

I once set someone up with data recovery services for a failed 40GB Fujitsu drive - the total came to ~$800 with the recovered data on a replacement (new) Maxtor 80GB drive. I RMA'd the drive and Fujitsu returned a $100 cheque. It was expensive, but the individual needed the data off the drive. So, if you need to take the drive to someone to have the data recovered the per GB cost you outlined above isn't that bad IMO.

I hope your sister has learned something from this. 🙂 Time for an external drive or DVD±RW if she doesn't already have one.

 

[mentalcrisis00]

I'm setting her and her kits up with an external drive that they can pool all their data onto, they all have DVD-RW drives now but they don't want to take the time to back their stuff up to a disc.