my brother's hd failed w/a ton of my pics on it. any way to retrieve them?

[cheapie]

my brother who lives w/my has a emachine. i was surfing tonight and it just crashed and started clicking. he called emachines and they sayed, yup, it's dead. we'll send you a new hd.

am i screwed? is there any way to get the images off of the hd?

is there somewhere i can send it to see what they can do? we have to send the hd back as soon as we get the new one.

tia!

[Markel]

A lot depends on just where the failure lies. I had a hard drive that failed (clickety-click), but I was able to read from most of it (the problem had to do with the \windows tree) by mounting it as a secondary drive, booting to safe mode (off a good primary), and copying files from the areas of the bad drive that I could read.

There are some utilities that might help - one that comes to mind is SpinRite from www.grc.com .

[cheapie]

clickety click. that's exactly what it's doing.

i just have a laptop as my other computer. maybe i'll drive the hd down to my bro-in-law that works as a support tech for an isp. he could help me

[eSDee]

Cheapie you might want to consider an external USB enclosure that you can put the IDE hard drive in. That way you install it then just plug it in your USB port, and if you have Windows XP it will automatically recognize it as a Mass Storage device. I did this for my buddies hard drive that he thought was dead, and it worked like a charm.

*edit* Here's the one I got:

http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=b:1458;c:36232;p:10500943

You can use it for an external DVD burner later if you wanted to.

[zippyjuan]

For next time, might suggest copying the picture files to a CD.

[Kevster]

Also, you may just try and put that HD in the freezer for a while to get the electronics nice and cold then try and boot it up. If it does, get everything off it as quickly as possible. I've had many drives fail and the freezer trick works most of the time to get the data off it.

[eSDee]

Originally posted by Kevster
Also, you may just try and put that HD in the freezer for a while to get the electronics nice and cold then try and boot it up. If it does, get everything off it as quickly as possible. I've had many drives fail and the freezer trick works most of the time to get the data off it.

Interesting!

[Jeffbx]

Originally posted by chosenfool
spinrite only works if its already BEEN installed doesnt it? i dont think it can help a crashed drive.


It can help after a crash, but unfortunately it only supports FAT32, not NTFS. Plus it hasn't been updated in about 4 years, so I don't know if I'd trust it with newer higher density drives.

I had pretty good luck recovering MOST of the files off of a HD that was making the dreaded clicking noise with Disk Commander from Winternals (http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/index.asp). I recovered about 2500 good files out of 2750 that were on the drive.

[gear02]

Is there any software that can diagnose a hard drive? I have a drive that clicks occasionally. I did a format with windows on the drive, but at a certain point it started to click and lock up, but the format did finish. However, I'm afraid to put any sort of data on it. I'm pretty sure that if I ran Maxtor's diag program it will work so I can't RMA it, but i'm also sure it's on its way to crash. What should I do?

[Merlin]

I've used a program called PC Inspector File Recovery to recover data in the past from a disk that went bad with very important information and it works pretty good. It is available from download.com


PC Inspector File Recovery is a data recovery program with support for FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. It recovers files with the original time and date stamp, and can optionally restore them to a network drive and can recover many files, even when a header entry is no longer available. On FAT systems, the programs finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged. PC Inspector File Recovery offers an easy to use interface that will scan your drive and automatically make files that can be recovered available from a "Deleted" folder in an Explorer Style navigation tree.

[Jeffbx]

Originally posted by gear02
Is there any software that can diagnose a hard drive? I have a drive that clicks occasionally. I did a format with windows on the drive, but at a certain point it started to click and lock up, but the format did finish. However, I'm afraid to put any sort of data on it. I'm pretty sure that if I ran Maxtor's diag program it will work so I can't RMA it, but i'm also sure it's on its way to crash. What should I do?

If it's a Maxtor, then the Maxtor diags are the first thing to try. If it froze & clicked for a while during format, that could have just been some sectors being marked as bad. Run the full diagnostic including the surface scan. If it comes up clean, then you just had some bad sectors that are now marked as such. If it's got bigger problems, then you'll get an error code & you can RMA it.

[Maarchk]

A few years ago i kiled a few hd's and they clicked and clacked for me. I had never thought about being able to save them but i held onto the drives just in case. Thank you for all your help guys. I am glad we have such helpful folks around.
:)

-m

[ray]

Originally posted by eSDeeLoco
Cheapie you might want to consider an external USB enclosure that you can put the IDE hard drive in. That way you install it then just plug it in your USB port, and if you have Windows XP it will automatically recognize it as a Mass Storage device. I did this for my buddies hard drive that he thought was dead, and it worked like a charm.

*edit* Here's the one I got:

http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=b:1458;c:36232;p:10500943

You can use it for an external DVD burner later if you wanted to.

:stupid:

I had my 6 year old WD hard drive click itself to death about 1.5 months ago. I plugged it into my external casing and hooked it up to my laptop. A couple hours later I had retrieved everything I wanted.

[Maarchk]

Will the enclosure work with both fat32 and ntfs?

TIA

Mark

[ray]

Originally posted by Maarchk
Will the enclosure work with both fat32 and ntfs?

TIA

Mark

The enclosure should detect both NTFS and FAT32 drives if that is what you're asking, but that doesn't mean your operating system will detect it. I forget what the compatabilities were between OS and NTFS/FAT32, but if i'm not mistaken, Win98 machines can't see NTFS partitions.

[Devhux]

Here's the breakdown:

FAT32 - Win95 OSR2, Win98, WinME, Win2000, WinXP
NTFS - Windows NT, 2000, & XP

[Maarchk]

Sorry for my lack of description. I have fat32 dead hard drives. And i am currently running xp. And i wanted to see if the drive would work with the computer. Which i am pretty sure it would from what you guys have said. It would not work the other way but this way sounds good.
Perhaps the freezer/enclosure combo ;)

Thanks for your help guys,

Mark

Oh and for zippy, I am gonna back my stuff up on disc :) I just bought a DVD 8x burner from amazon. :)

[Markel]

Originally posted by Kevster
Also, you may just try and put that HD in the freezer for a while to get the electronics nice and cold then try and boot it up. If it does, get everything off it as quickly as possible. I've had many drives fail and the freezer trick works most of the time to get the data off it.
And if that fails, consider the 199 other possibilities in 200 Ways To Revive A Hard Drive (http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf)

[SmokeyDP]

My brothers 20Gig western Digital crapped out last night. I was able to put it in my USB 2.0 enclosure and copy what ever I needed off of it without a hitch.