hard drive crash

my 80gb hdd that was purely for data has crashed. taking with it the 25gb of cisco material with it but worst the personal stuff that was on it.

one of the other pcs i have shows that its having a smart error but the drive still feels like its spins. does anyone have any tricks to make the drive accessible so i can remove the data?

thus far i have put the drive in the freezer and still the same.. still spins but not accessible

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

sprkymrk

Once or twice I have been successful by replacing the controller board portion of the drive with a replacement from an exact model of a second drive, especially if it still spins.

keenon

its a WD800 model number WD800JB-00ETA0

sprkymrk

Yeah, if you have (or can get hold of) another WD 80GB you might be able to swap boards and recover your data.

Does the BIOS still see the drive? If so, you might be able to boot with Windows (or otherwise) boot disk that can read ntfs and copy it to another drive:
http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm

keenon

the bios somewhat does on 1 system but not the other

i'll try moving it again

don't have anymore laying around i will see if i can ask around

snadam

sprkymrk wrote:

Yeah, if you have (or can get hold of) another WD 80GB you might be able to swap boards and recover your data.

Does the BIOS still see the drive? If so, you might be able to boot with Windows (or otherwise) boot disk that can read ntfs and copy it to another drive:
http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm

I would try that first before you start tearing up hard drisks and swapping plates and such

boyles23

I have used an external hd enclosure several times, which connects via USB and then copy the data off from there. Good possibility of it working since the drive is still spinning up! Another option I have used was knoppix which let us access the drive but it all depends on how bad the drive is. Hope this helps, let us know.

Regards

Jon

sprkymrk

snadam wrote:

sprkymrk wrote:

Yeah, if you have (or can get hold of) another WD 80GB you might be able to swap boards and recover your data.

Does the BIOS still see the drive? If so, you might be able to boot with Windows (or otherwise) boot disk that can read ntfs and copy it to another drive:
http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm

I would try that first before you start tearing up hard drisks and swapping plates and such

No plate swapping, just the little printed circuit board on the bottom of the drive. Held in by like 3-4 small screws.

RussS

Hopefully the freezer treatment has not damaged anything serious. If it is spinning up I would hazard a guess that the board is doing what it should and that the problem is a NTFS error. Putting the drive in a USB caddy and firing it up after the control machine has booted has been a successful way for me to run recovery software to salvage something for a client.

leefdaddy

all those certs/studying and you don't have a backup? shame on you.

JDMurray

The freezer treatment is one one-shot thing, not a fix. You freeze the drive and hope it regains functionality long enough (5-10 minutes, usually) to copy the important data off of it. Once the drive thaws, the drive is likely to be in worse condition because of condensation.

I have swapped controller boards on WD drive before, like sprkymrk suggested, but it's difficult. If the drive was a master, make it a slave in another computer. Sometimes when a controller goes bad it won't operate as a master anymore, but the drive will work as a slave.

If the drive comes up as a slave, I immediately run SpinRite on it at a Level 2 setting. If the problem is not electro-mechanical, SpinRite will 99% of the time fix the drive to the point where data can be correctly copied from it.

Good luck.

Plantwiz

JDMurray wrote:

If the drive comes up as a slave, I immediately run SpinRite on it at a Level 2 setting. If the problem is not electro-mechanical, SpinRite will 99% of the time fix the drive to the point where data can be correctly copied from it.

Good luck.

I was just going to post use SpinRite then saw that JD beat me to it.

Exactly correct on the freezing a drive...It's a good tool to use, but it's a last resort.

1. SpinRite
2. Possible new controller board (though as much as I HATE WD drives....I wouldn't buy another on purpose)....though if it solves your problem..then it's possibly worth it.
3. Outsource the work to a data recovery lab (many more now then a few years back...but too expensive (IMNSHO) for many drives.

Go with SpinRite.

snadam

sprkymrk wrote:

No plate swapping, just the little printed circuit board on the bottom of the drive. Held in by like 3-4 small screws.

shows my knowledge of hardware troubleshooting

I get what youre saying now.

either way, Id try all other possible solutions first before you start taking the drive apart.

as some already suggested, making it the slave (or secondary, for all you politically correct people) drive in another machine is another good method of recovering data.