Legit Reviews

ok, went to fire up my home pc last night and it froze just as it would start to look for IDE devices. So I'm like WTF. I start to yank stuff to find the bad part. I striped it down to the C drive and still nothing...

I noticed that my HD wasn't spining up when the power came on. so I unpluged it and pluged in my DVD and tried to boot to a Konnopix CD and it did.

so I'm pretty sure my C drive is dead, then I got to thinking how old the drive is, its a 5-6 year old wetern digital 40 gig. The suck part is that I had some stuff on there for my little sisters wedding, all the vid editing that I was doing and photo shop work, this is where I'm screwed I think.

Since the drive wont spin up there isn't a way to get the info off of it is there?

The ironic part is last night I was going to save the stuff I had done to DVD's as a back up. I'm just trying to find a way to not have to re-import all the video, almost 6 hours worth and its not DVI its on HI8 so I have to go through a vid bridge.

OH MAN! That sucks. I had my Western Digital drive die on me a week ago and it was only 1.5 years old. If you go onto WD's website, you can register for an RMA number and it will tell you if your drive is still under warranty and then they will replace it if it is.
As far as retrieving your data from a dead drive, it prettymuch cannot be done
Sorry to hear about the loss.

yeah, that what I had figured. I'm just mad that I didnt back up the night before like I should have.

Live and learn, the hard way.

But I will check on the waranty, thought it was only for 4 years though.

You could try to freeze the drive. Depending on the problem, you might be able to get the drive to spin one last time for data recovery. Sometimes by freezing the drive (obviously you want to make sure that no moisture will occur on the drive during this process) will loosen up the parts to work again. At least, I think that is what I heard happens. If the drive is 5-6 years old and if you knew that the controller on the drive is fried then you might have the chance to find another old drive like yours and switch out the controller. However, that is a gamble.

I dunno about dead drives. I've had a few that seemd dead as a doornail, but once I re-installed Windows to another drive and booted up, the 'dead' drive was accessible for file retrieval. Just because it won't POST or boot, doesn't necessarily mean it can't be accessed whatsoever.

Get a new drive, set the dead one up as a slave, and see what happens. Nothing to lose, and plenty to gain.

In any case, all dead drives deserve a 'Viking Funeral' Get out the charcoal lighter fluid and send her off to Valhalla. Makes ME feel better, anyway, to watch that motherf%#@er roast

That's actually not a bad idea smartdaze. Ya never know about computer hardware!

And yeah, I've also heard of the freezing of the hard drive thing before too. Never tried it, but if the drive is already "dead", you don't really have much to lose.

yeah, don't give up just yet. I also heard, there are HDD recovery places who specialize in recovering data from dead or even damaged, phisically smashed drives. I'm not sure about prices though. google around

I'll try the slave thing tonight, if that dont work then the freeze.

good idea on the funeral

sbohdan wrote:yeah, don't give up just yet. I also heard, there are HDD recovery places who specialize in recovering data from dead or even damaged, phisically smashed drives. I'm not sure about prices though. google around

Professional Data recovery is VERY expensive, but if you really need the data it is the best choice. (they can go as far as takeing the platters/disc out and putting them in a known work drive of the same model, which requires a cleanroom)
If you would just very much like to recover the data, but could live without it, try the freeze trick, a hard smack on a table (from about 1 foot--MUST hit flat!) or as a slave in another computer.
Motor/bearing failure with out having made a bad noise for a while is very rare

as mentioned if you can boot from another drive you might be ok

try booting from Knoppix and see if you can mount the drive!
Knoppix will detect the drive aswell as XP, but without the need to sit through installing xp again.

If the drive doesn't spin @ all, then it mayby brown bread!
Freezing will only work if the drives motors work and the disk spins!

If you go down the road of freezing the drive, make sure to wrap it up well so it can't get wet...also don't leave it in for too long!

smartadze wrote:I dunno about dead drives. I've had a few that seemd dead as a doornail, but once I re-installed Windows to another drive and booted up, the 'dead' drive was accessible for file retrieval. Just because it won't POST or boot, doesn't necessarily mean it can't be accessed whatsoever.

Get a new drive, set the dead one up as a slave, and see what happens. Nothing to lose, and plenty to gain.

In any case, all dead drives deserve a 'Viking Funeral' Get out the charcoal lighter fluid and send her off to Valhalla. Makes ME feel better, anyway, to watch that motherf%#@er roast

that's what i did with my old ide 40gb western digital. it died as my master, but worked perfectly as a backup hard drive.

I would suggest first putting it on a different power supply cable.
using a linux boot cd to try to access the data.
freezing as a second to last resort.
I have a friend who does data recovory, who might for the cost of some beer at least look to see if the data can be recovored.

yeah I thought about the cable thing last night, didnt work.

Might take ya up on the recovery thing if the slave trick dont pan out. wont know till sunday some time, my works comp party is tonight and the wifes is tomorrow. so sunday is recupe day.

Seems everyone already said everything I could think of and then some, but what about trying it in a different computer? Maybe it's not the HD that went bad. I suppose it's not as likely if your DVD drive works on that channel, but couldn't hurt right? I'm never one to discount anything unless I try it, lol.

Well, worst case scenario you'll still have some fun refrigerator magnets to play with.

Those things are strong!

I got the drvie to where I could see it. Had to gank a drive from the old pc I had set up for the kids but got xp on it up and running.

I switch the drive to slave and booted up. BIOS saw it and XP saw it. I was only able to grab some of the files, still saves me some work, but the better part of it was corrupted data but was atleast able to save the dvd menu template I made so I was happy about that.

now on to reinstalling, only going to put on what I need to get by till I can get a new drive...

at least something

yeah, better to get some of the data than none at all