Topic awaiting preservation: My HD didn't survive my vacation...

Hi all!
Right now I'm seriously frustated...
I've been on a superb vacation for 2 weeks now, before I went I unplugged my main 'puter in case of lightning and so on.
As I came home and started it, it went directly into disc diagnostics and in the middle it froze with a BSOD "Unknown Hard error". Restart didn't help, it was even impossible to get into safemode or bios?!?!? The fourth time I tried it started clicking like if the reading arm on the HD went back and forth between the stops...

I then tried to boot with knoppix from cd but that didn't work, opened the box and switched primary and secondary drives on the IDE's (I've got an 80 Gb disc with Winblows XP Home for programs and similar plus a separate 10 Gb discfor files) Now I could get it to boot with knoppix but I could only see the small disc and the other kept clicking away... Right now I'm pounding my head on the desk for not trying knoppix earlier, I just might have been able to reach some files on the disc before the dreaded "clicking" started...

Naturally over time (4 years) a LOT of files ended up on the 80 Gb disc asides for the good intentions with an extra disc, esp all my old mails and contacts plus a lot more stuff, backups that has been transferred from older PC's and so on... Fortunately all my webcode and digital photos remains safe on my Mac laptop...

Naturally the old saying: "Real men don't do backups, they just cry..." feels uncomfortably close to home right now...

Does anyone know the odds for recovering the data from this disc?
I havn't done any formatting or anything on it, during the winblows disc check it said it was "Replacing damaged clusters in <filepath> with name (NULL)".

Any tips are very, very appreciated at this point. The windows installation is on the faulty disc so there is no way that I've found to repair the installation as I can find, also as I said, knoppix doesn't even see it.


What a way to return from vacation...

/Dan

{cell 260} {Blog}
-{ ?There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. - Jeremy S. Anderson" }-

There is a possibility that you can purchase the exact same HD, and then transfer the PCB circuit board over, in case something on the circuit has gone hayware. This is something i have sucessfully done with 2 supposedly dead HD's in the past.

There is also another method, that i have not tried myself, have heard does work, and that to put the drive in a platic airtight freezer bag and then place it in the freezer for a little while. The clicking sound you hear is the plates and apparently the freezing action allows you to have enough time to boot up the HD and transfer data across to another source.

You might want to check this forum for more info. Its worth it as a last ditch attempt. Freeze the damn HD

No Sig ?

Must find person that discovered freezing his HD fixed it.


he's either brilliant or a complete nutjob.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

Before you start messing with the pcb or try something else destructive, get yourself BartPE
Get some file recovery plugins This could solve already some isues.
If you want to pay for data recovery software, there are some very good optionsd outhere just google for them.

Try to reset the bios from your computer, see the manual from your mainboard how to do this mostly an little junmper is involved, i think your bios has emptied his backup battery while you where away and the machine did not reload this battery since it was unplugged.
After resetting the bios let the bios autodetect the settings from the HD's this could be a solution too. Some hardisks need a small waiting time at booting but these HD's are very rare today.

Good luck

------------------------------
Support Justice for Pat Richard

(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 07-15-2005 23:54)

Thanx for the tips so far

I won't hunt for a new hd, that's out, it's a OEM hd from Compaq and it's from 2001 so I'll never find it... Even if I could I wouldn't try to replace circuit boards or chips on a hd, I'll burn it totally for sure

The freezer thing was interesting but it sounds like an absolute last resort, thing is, it didn't boot even when cold.

It took me an hour to get in to bios in the first place (don't ask, at first I couldn't even boot from a floppy or CD without disconnecting the disc) and all settings are ok so while the tip sounds solid, it doesn't seem like that's the problem. Bios is set to auto detect the discs but only the small one is found.

If I boot from cd with the XP install and choose recover (to try to restore the MBR) it says "no discs can be found", same if I try fdisk /mbr from a startup floppy. Knoppix on CD only finds the healthy disc. I'm thinking that either it's a mechanical failure or it's lost the MBR or something that causes it to forget that it's a disc anymore.

I talked to a buddy that runs a computer security company, he has a guy that might be able to help with recovery when he's back from vacation.
I think I'll just rip it out of the box in the meantime and pick up a new disc (I'll need that anyway).

I'll leave all the freezer stuff and similar 'til after he's looked at it.

I looked at the BartPE and while it looks good I've got exactly one 'puter with XP & a burner, the broken one... I'll see if I can get to it at some other place. I doubt it will help at this point though since the drive can't be detected at all.

Ok, now I'm off to burn backups of my photos and webcode from the mac... Lesson learned...
/D

{cell 260} {Blog}
-{ ?There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. - Jeremy S. Anderson" }-

Well, why not, when you buy the new drives, after you've installed XP on it, put the fritzy drive in that computer again, as a slave, and install the burner in it, and then run BartPE?


Justice 4 Pat Richard

Are you sure it's not just suffering from "stiction"? Sometimes the R/W heads stick to the platters in older drives that are seldom powered-down. You can hear or feel whether the platters are spinning or not. If not, just whack the drive with your knuckles (the proverbial short, sharp, shock) a time or two. That can get them spinning again and solves the problem until the next power-down.

BTW, I've successfully done the freezer thing a few times. It works best when it's an overheating issue--generally failing electronics rather than mechanicals. May require repeat applications to get all the data off the drive, exercise caution in high humidity.