WAY OT –Data Recovery Services for a failed Hard Drive

Try SpinRite ($80) from Steve Gibson. Google it since I can't post URLs :-)

Smiley (a yellow belly)

Even if the drive is toast, companies such as Ontrack can usually extract the data from it. Unfortunately, this type of service isn't cheap. It really just depends on how important the data is to you. If it's irreplaceable stuff like home movies or photos, it might be worth it.

Recovery is several hundred dollars to $1000 and if the data is THAT important, I would not touch it. Ontrack will most likely recover everything unless you muck it up more.

in case the disk is good, but the OS is corrupt (unbootable), you may be able to boot off a CD or another disk and then treat the original disk as a data disk. If the disk is clicking, then likely it is toast and you'll have to use another method

good luck ....
kcgr (also a Rambling Wreck)

I have had some luck with recovering data from clicking drives, in some cases nearly 99%. As long as you are not going to exercise the warranty, then I would get a new boot drive for you system, then put the bad drive as a second drive in your system. I would then create a directory on the new drive called "OldWD" or something like that, then cut and paste everything from the bad drive to that new directory. Any file that can't be moved this way is probably toast enough that you may not be able to save it.

Once you can't sucessfully move any more files, then you can sometimes get them to copy using lower level commands. Here is the contents of the batch file I would use from a command prompt on the new drive;

c:
cd\\
MD OldWD
CD OldWD
xcopy e:\\*.* /s /d /c /y

The beauty is that you can keep running it over and over and it will still try to copy files. When it repeatedly hits the same file and won't stop clicking, I then delete that file and run it again.

I would do the freezer trick last since it usually is only good for just a few minutes. I have sucessfully done the freezer trick many times, just use it as the last try at recovery when all else has been exhausted.

Hope that helps.

I used h**p"//www.dtidata.com in the past and saved some important things on one of my drives.

I worked on a circa 2001 WD 20GB drive Friday that blew out the boot sector and some other data.
The computer failed to boot and when booted with the UBCD4WINDOWS CD (http://ubcd4win.com) the computer didn't even see the old hard drive. Removed it from the computer and connected it to my Vantec SATA/IDE to USB adapter on my computer. Was able to get all the doc's except one, all the photos and all but two mp3's off that failing drive. I've used this adapter several times now on bad drives with pretty good results.
One strange thing that I've found is that once you see and navigate around the bad drive using windows explorer- only select 10-20 files at a time to transfer off the drive. If you try to just copy and paste the whole folder off the bad drive to your computer the transfer will likely fail, but if you instead just go into that folder and select several files then let them transfer then select some more and let them transfer... eventually you may get 99% of what you're looking for. Just don't be in a hurry using this method...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812232002

Do you happen to have access to a high powered electromagnet? That should do the trick!

Yes, because the Russian mob is constantly trying to infiltrate WD and use some big guns for hire to steal your Aunt Jane's email address.

yep. just magnetize the sucker and you're good to go. Use the warranty.

Actually, you have to DE-magnetize it, which is why you need an electro-magnet...

Henry

So just how much porn did you have on that disk?


PS: Everyone has already seen Britney Spears go commando, so there's no sense hiding your nude pictures of her.

Ditto. Very quick recovery from most disk hardware failures.


And if that doesn't work - try this:


http://www.r-studio.com/


You will of course need a working PC and a big drive to implement option #2.

Your drive is physically damaged.But still your data may be recoverable.You can try Stellar Information System Ltd data recovery service.They are providing good data recovery solution for both physical and logical damage hard drive.They provides solution for Windows (Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP), Apple Macintosh, Novell, Linux, Unix operating system and FAT, NTFS, NTFS5, HFS, HFS+, NWFS, EXT2 and EXT3 file systems.

The hard drive recovery services by stellar are really appreciable. I have used the Stellar software for windows platform named stellar Phoenix windows data recovery software , would say only three words - cheap, user friendly and fast. First i tried the free download version and after that I got the complete one . U can get it here http://www.windows-data-recovery.net/

U may also search for some other data recovery software at very low price than mentioned in above replies

All the best

Try TestDisk: hatch tee tee pee colon slash slash dub dub dub dot cgsecurity dot org slash wiki slash TestDisk

It's free.

It might restore your drive, and if not, it might copy the contents to another drive.

I have an external drive that lost its partition table. It tried to fix it but couldn't. It did copy all the data off the disk.

I have the Gibson utility. It hasn't been updated in years, and it failed miserably on my drive.

Good luck.

Further on TestDisk.

I'm running it now to recover several hundred GBs from an external drive that lost its MBR or partition table or something. TestDisk couldn't repair the drive, but it found all the files. I'm using its copy feature to transfer all the files to another disk. It is pretty slow at less than 3MB/sec, so I expect it will take a couple of days to finish, but on the plus side, it keeps the original timestamps on files and directories. It runs in a DOS shell with a minimal UI and no progress information of the current folder\\file or % complete, but bells and whistles aside, it's doing exactly what I want it to do.

It was free compared to $80 for GRC, and doesn't require a boot floppy *AND* it works, which GRC did not. I'm actually very disappointed with Gibson Research. I bought their product over 3 years ago, and it is still the same version they provide today.

When I have the drive backed up, I'm going to use some of the other features it has to try and repair the disk before I reformat it. I'm interested to see if it can rebuild the damaged structures and restore the disk to its former state. I avoided these choices prior to the backup because they seemed risky.

Actually not. Very few people have access to a magnet powerful enough to erase bits from outside the drive case. A common permanent magnet, tape eraser, or TV degausser won't do anything. An MRI machine's magnet might work.

P.S. To all the people spamming/promoting your favorite data recovery adware, read what the OP wrote - his drive is totally dead. No software is going to help him.