One dead Seagate

[buckmasterson]

My Niece sent me here Seagate 4.3 gig and asked if I could recover her wedding pictures from it. The drive "clicks" like something is broken. Does Seagate or anyone else repair drives without restoring them?

 

[Mark R]

You need to contact a data recovery company with drive repair facilities:

www.ontrack.com
and
www.drivesavers.com

are 2 that come to mind, but there are many others.

These services are NOT cheap, but it won't hurt to ask for a quote. A friend in a similar situation was quoted about $3000 when a drive failed about 4 years ago. He didn't take them up on the offer.

 

[mitchafi]

Perhaps try the ontrack easy recovery program. It worked great for me and was simple to use when I accidentally deleted a partition. However, I'm not sure it will work since your harddrive has a more serious problem. It's worth a try, though.

 

[boran]

the clicks are most likely head resets, if you can find a harddrive of the EXACT same model you might try to swap the controller boards, because clicks can also indicate a controller board problem (so the problem could be there and not on the platters or motors themselves) but it might have been a headcrash or the controller board going bad might have written junk to the disk, so it might not even be possible to recover all data, if it is relly important i'd ask a quote from a data recovery firm, but as stated before, they charge quite a lot.

 

[redbeard1]

Drive clicking is not good. If the problem is with the heads and not the controller board, anything you try will be doing further damage, and would make a recovery harder.

Drivesavers economy service $500-$1900
Ontrack $700-$2300

 

[buckmasterson]

Thanks everyone!

 

[brigden]

I've heard of people putting their drives in the freezer and being able to recover data from it.

 

[BryansAccount]

I too have used the freezer trick to partially resurect drives long enough to get a few files off.

 

[jagec]

If you do the freezer trick, be sure you wrap the drive well in plastic to prevent condensation.

 

[vshah]

Originally posted by: jagec
If you do the freezer trick, be sure you wrap the drive well in plastic to prevent condensation.

yeah the freezer trick works...but i'd double wrap it just to be sure...

-Vivan

 

[dkozloski]

Hard drives periodically do a thermal recalibrate and relocate the data tracks which move around from temperatue changes. If the tracks move far enough the heads travel out of range trying to find them. This makes the clicking noise when they hit the mechanical stops. The rationale behind the freezer trick is to bring the tracks back into range with an extreme temperature excursion at least long enough to recover important data.