failed Hard drive

[timdog]

so i had a hard drive fail on me today, with some pretty important data on it. i'm an IT guy but still was not smart enough to back it up regularly. all my pictures from trips to europe and mexico, etc are on there plus important financial data and stuff I definitely need. has anyone gone to any of these data recovery places?
i am not talking deleted data here, but a failed HDD. windows doesnt see it, linux doesnt see it. it seems to power up and doesnt seem to make any really audible noises except for the usual hard drive spinning sounds. if i 'scan for hardware changes' in device manager several times, it will pick it up every once in a while, and then crap out 1 second later. cant even see the drive letter pop up in my computer.
anyway, wondering if anyone had any hookups or know of any decent recovery places to go? it's a 250GB drive but there is really only about 20GB of data I need. the rest is movies, tv shows, some games and stuff like that. i googled some data recovery places in calgary but most are closed for the weekend so i won't know anything until Monday. they also seem to charge atleast 4 or 500 bucks which is a little steep. i am willing to spend up to 200 bucks or so.


Tim

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

p.s. the drive is IDE.

[Kordain]

Re: failed Hard drive

what make and model number is your drive, we keep a large group of old drives at work just in case a circuit board goes down on one and we have to transplant, worked a few times in the past. Its usually a chip that dies, you may even be able to see where its volcano'd.

I have no idea about recovery firms but ill ask at work (on monday)

[R_Ethug]

Re: failed Hard drive

if its clicking your prolly screwed unless you take it to a recovery shop that pulls the platters and moves them to another one

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

nice - i was thinking the same thing (replace the circuit board) but the drive is kinda old so i couldnt find any replacments online.

It's a seagate 7200.8 250GB drive.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

it doesnt seem to be clicking. so i think the platters are good to go.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

i actually had device manager find it for long enough to produce an error in the system event viewer.

"This disk, \device\harddisk2 has a bad sector"

which doesnt make sense, because a bad sector wouldnt ruin the entire drive, just a few files. which i could deal with.

[Kordain]

Re: failed Hard drive

thats just a bad chip confusing it

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

i personally agree with your theory. and is the direction i was going. i inspected the PCB for like 20 minutes with a bright light and couldnt see any damage so it's gotta be a fried chip or something. i'm going to spend the weekend looking for an identical drive....

Eric - if you find a seagate 7200.8 drive pls let me know. if you feel like it you can call my cell (PMing it to you). I will honestly pay you if you can help with this.

[Stonewall]

Re: failed Hard drive

I have heard if you stick them in the freezer (in a bag) sometimes you can get the info off them that you need. If the drive died from age you will not be able to tell which is the bad IC without a schematic and in depth knowledge of the circuit... well unless the part let the magic smoke out.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

yeah, which is the idea behind replacing the entire circuit board with an identical drive. i wouldnt want to troubleshoot the actual circuit, just replace the whole damn thing...
i tried the freezer trick and it didnt do it. although i only had it in the freezer for about an hour. but if the PCB theory is correct then the freezer trick is unrelated.

[Vulcan]

Re: failed Hard drive

Be careful with the swapping circuit boards....You have to use one that is the same version rather than just one from the same drive. As a side note I have some data recovery tools...
1) Deep Spar Imager http://www.deepspar.com/products-ds-disk-imager.html
It uses a three scan pass method.....reads the drive, images all the good parts and then goes back and jack hammers on the damaged sectors.
2) King Demi http://www.yec-usa.com/
Link seems to be currently down.
The King Demi is more of a brute force tool....you set how many times it tries to read each cluster and it bangs away on it.
3) Spinrite - Very good DOS tool for data recovery.

All three tools have recovered several hundred drives for me or at least part of the drive (All methods work the drive hard and can kill off a drive that is on its last legs). I prefer the Deep Spar as it gets all the easy to get data off right away before it goes to work on the hard to recover stuff.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

thanks i'll try these

[claxx]

Re: failed Hard drive

u could try give http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
also testdisk is good as well

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

spinrite seemed like the only one that might work, so i tried that.. and it started to work, saw the drive and then failed 2 minutes later (division flow error or something).

anyway the drive is a Seagate ST3250823A firmware 3.03.
so if anyone has this exact drive, i will definitely take it off your hands if the price is reasonable.
i could also go on ebay but dont really want to wait for shipping times, etc.