OT: hard drive crash

My friends hard drive crashed yesterday. I'm looking for sites and suggestions for him to get it going temporarly to get the data off (if he's lucky). Symptoms were clicking and possibly the hard drive spinning on and off. Thanks Karl

Reply to
kfvorwerk
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Look for Hiren's Boot cd or ERD Commander. Hiren's boot cd is currently posted in alt.binaries.comp. Has a whole slew of utilities that may be able to help you save your data. ERD commander was also recently posted in that group too. Depending on the retention of your newsserver, you may be able to find them both. Dave

Reply to
dav1936531

Take it to a "professional" so there is less chance of losing data.

Jim Chandler

Reply to
Jim Chandler

how valuable is that data? if it can be duplicated or recreated in less than 40 or 50 hours of work, just do so - you may or may not get anything off of it, I've had very mixed luck, though I haven't resorted to major forensics - and professional recovery services are generally ineffective and expensive in my limited experience

Reply to
William Noble

Not cheap, and no guarantee they will get usefull data.

Only two kinds of computer users - those who have lost data, and those who will.

BACK UP!!!!!

Reply to
clare at snyder.on.ca

Stick it in the freezer for about 6 hours inside a zip lock bag, and boot it up as a slave drive and dump it as fast as you can. It may take several freezings to get it all, depending on size.

regular Backups to DVD-RW are quite cheap these days as are 200gig USB drives.

Gunner

"Try thinking of the Libertarian Party as a rolled-up newspaper, useful in making the Republican puppy (I've given up on the Democratic bitch) go where he's supposed to -- not on that beautiful antique carpet we call the Constitution." -- L. Neil Smith, Bill Clinton's Reichstag Fire

Reply to
Gunner

Sometimes getting that hard drive really cool and keeping it cool is enough to get it to run, at least long enough to recover the data - open the computer case and sit it right in front of a running air conditioner cranked to max.

(Freezer is bad. You don't want to get below the dew point and have condensation forming inside the drive, hitting a drop of water on the platter would be like running the read/write head into a boulder.)

Get a copy of Spinrite at

formatting link
- Worst case it confirms that the drive is toast, best case if there are any signs of life it can recover the data long enough to pull it off to another drive. (Written in machine language, downloads in a flash even at 14.4)

Steve designed a really nifty engine that gets raw control of the drive heads and steppers (Bypassing all the SMART drive electronics that tries to hide problems) and just keeps going over damaged areas and adjusting the head position a little off to each side of the track till it is sure what the data was. Then it moves it all to a spare sector and marks the old location as bad.

There are other programs that aim more toward disaster recovery, but Spinrite will do quite a bit. And after it does the recovery and you get the backups made, then you keep it around for pre-disaster tests. Test that suspect hard drive weekly to see if it's getting worse - if you keep coming up with new bad sectors every time you run a test scan, the drive is dying, get a new one.

-->--

Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

Bart's PE. It takes a bit of learning but this has been my best tools. Look at "Spinrite" too. Sometimes they are just dead. You might suggest he restore his backed up data on a new drive.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Put a large fresh silica gel sachet in the ziplock with the drive and let it mop up any humidity for about an hour before you freeze it. Have the connector at the opening end of the bag so you dont have to expose more of the drive than the minimum to plug it in. Condensation is a killer.

If at all possible, only go after document folders and the user's desktop. You need to get as much as you can of the critical stuff without wasting *any* time copying binaries that will only work if the application or OS is reinstalled. Check with the owner if he had anything important in non-standard locations.

I'm curious what software you use for backup to DVD? I seem to recall an eclectic mix of older PC's in Gunnerland(R) so your preferred solution may well suit my systems. Also any info on what NOT to use would be valuable. Currently I'm backing up to multiple networked PCs, JAZ and some stuff to CDR. AFAIK I haven't actually lost any document I created and saved to hard disk on any of my systems since the mid 80's except when I was dumb enough to overwrite it, but after 20 years of bucking the odds, I dont feel *that* lucky!

Reply to
Ian Malcolm

Only farm it out to a Pro if the data is worth hundreds of dollars. If so, get a ballpark figure from a data recovery specialist (*NOT* a guy who fixes PCs) then take their advice on pulling the drive and packing it to ship to them.

If its just business data or acedemic stuff and paper records exist it may well be cheaper to hire a data entry clerk and get them typed back in, especially if one is somewhat selective as to *what* the clerk is given to reenter and what gets a 1 line note referring to the hard copy.

If its personal photos etc. it may or may not be worth it depending on their importance. Only your friend can decide that when you have some idea of the cost.

ONLY LOOK AT DIY METHODS AFTER YOU HAVE GONE OVER THE COST/BENEFIT OF PRO DATA RECOVERY WITH YOUR FRIEND AND GET IT IN WRITING THAT HE UNDERSTANDS THAT YOU MAY NOT GET IT ALL BACK, OR EVEN ANY OF IT AND THAT THE DRIVE MAY WELL DETERIORATE FURTHER EVEN TO THE POINT OF TOTAL FAILURE, MAKING IT UNRETREVABLE EVEN BY THE PROS.

I always used to tell customers that *some* of their data was allready like last year's snow, which did a lot to reduce unrealistic expectations . . .

Good Luck, the OP will need it :-)

Reply to
Ian Malcolm

Indeed. Great idea about the silica. Not something I think about too much when the humitity here is at 15% or less.

Im buying new pulled DVD-Rs for $25 for internals, $35 for USB externals from one of my computer buddies who runs a surplus/disposal computer place.

Ive used Nero in the past for backups, but since Im transitioning over to Linux..K3b and GnomeBake does a pretty fair job of doing images and compressed data backups. Plus I do regular image backups on the big drives in my servers. Mostly Ebooks, photos, downloads and so forth.

"Try thinking of the Libertarian Party as a rolled-up newspaper, useful in making the Republican puppy (I've given up on the Democratic bitch) go where he's supposed to -- not on that beautiful antique carpet we call the Constitution." -- L. Neil Smith, Bill Clinton's Reichstag Fire

Reply to
Gunner

Thanks for your quick reply . I've still got a couple of tape streamers here so am familiar with that style of backup software and my burners are still running Adaptec (NOT Roxio) so I dont know the current Nero package. I have a chance to evaluate Nero later this week but if it doesn't do what I need (scriptable, capable of un-attended burning except for media changes) I am thinking about alternatives, preferably freeware or better open source. I've heard bad things about the reliability of DVDRW and packet writing compared to DVDR with a ISO9660, Joliet or Rockridge filesystem, which wouldn't surprise me based on my CDR/CDRW experiance. Any comments?

Reply to
Ian Malcolm

It's his home computer. Major hassle but not worth the big bucks of a recovery service. I'm sending him the link for this thread. He asked me about the chilling the hard drive but I didn't know anything about it. I've got a good news server so I'll go see what I can grab him. Thanks for all the help. Karl

Reply to
kfvorwerk

Got them both. I'll burn them for him. Thanks Karl

Reply to
kfvorwerk

The icebox techique has been explained. Also taking out of case, trying in different positions can help. Grab drive model number and look on ebay for a used drive with same controller card (stuck to bottom) and swap them.

Spinrite is good for some kinds of errors but not all. Don't want to get in a religious war on this. I bought it, it has helped at times and at other times higher level tools were needed.

Consider trying drive in a different pc with jumpers set accordingly. Would eliminate power, cable, and motherboard issues.

Be ready with storage room and a game plan if you get any life out of the drive.

Paying for professional drive recovery has already been discussed.

Wes

Reply to
Wes

Ths sad story illustrates a need for nightly backups, preferably multiple and verified. In the last 6 months, I had two hard drives die on me, one at home (my 6 year old son's computer) and one at work.

That every hard drive will fail after some time, is a certainty. They all die eventually.

It is only a question of when they die.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus20900

I would expect data recovery from a data recovery company to run in the $1000 range these days plus the cost of a new drive to hold the data. They do stuff like move boards and controller from an exactly similar drive to the sick drive to get the data off it. That's not many hours of work for a professional. Both times I needed it (for business) over the past 20 years, they got all the data back. Even if you are dutifully doing backups and the backup is more than a week old, it might well be worth it financially.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

What were the causes of the failures?

Well, yes, but... Western Digital, for example, is now touting products with MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.2 million hours.

That's 137 *years*.

The average modern hard drive will become obsolete *long* before it experiences any hardware failures.

Reply to
Doug Miller

I am sorry, I did not do an autopsy, but I have my son's HD and I can open it up to see. I heard some screeching/grinding noises, bad sector errors and failures to read files. (I am using Linux)

What I do know is that they did not run hot.

No big deal, bought a new HD and installed a a new version of Linux, and restored the files that I cared about, from CVS.

Those were several years old, I do not believe that they were made to such a spec -- but I would love to buy hard drives that can last 137 years -- and then live long enough to still witness death of those hard drives!

i
Reply to
Ignoramus20900

That one sure sounds like a hard failure. :-)

Probably not.

Hear, hear!

Reply to
Doug Miller

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