Thread: Hard drive recovery and cryogenics...
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Re: Hard drive recovery and cryogenics...

 
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  #10
Jan 18th, 2006
Your chances of having success with recovery software will depend on exactly how/why the drive died, or whether it was really the drive that died, or some other component.

Some of the usual things to do when diagnosing a "dead" drive are:

* Check to see if the drive feels/sounds like it is spinning up.
* Check the data and power cables. Make sure they are seated firmly, and that there is no physical damage (nick, cuts, etc.) to them. Try different cables if possible.
* Remove the drive and physically inspect the circuitry on the drive's controller card. Check for burned/cracked/discolored components. Use your nose- sniff around for that distinctive, telltale smell of overheated silicon.
* Install the drive as a slave drive and see if it still exhibits problems. Make sure to pay attention to Master/Slave/Cable Select jumper settings on the drives.

- If the drive doesn't seem to power up/spin up regardless of what you've tried, and/or if you've found possible damage on the drive controller circuit card, your only option might be to replace the controller. That can be done, but it should be done by a professional.

- If, when you installed the drive as a slave, it drive seems to spin up and you can access its contents, you're obviously in pretty good shape. Copy your data off of the drive on to another hard drive, a CD, or whatever ASAP.

- If the drive seems to spin up when installed in another Windows computer and that computer's BIOS recognizes that the drive is present, but the drive's contents are not recognized by Windows, you may have corruption of the partition table, MBR, or filesystem instead of physical hardware problems. At that point, you have a couple of options:

1. You can try running a repair/recovery utility, although those programs can do more harm than good unless you know exactly what you're doing. I've used the free evaluation version of DFSee and was very impressed with it; I'd buy the full Pro version if it cost a bit less than $250 USD.

2. If you (or someone you know) is familiar with Linux, you may be able to access/rescue the data on your drive by installing it in a computer running that operating system. If a computer with Linux installed on it isn't available to you, you can download (at no cost) one of the "Live" Linux versions, which will run entirely off of a bootable CD-ROM. I've successfully used this method many times.
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