Ack! Data recovery time

[weirdwaldo]

To make this brief, my 250 gigger (WD something or another) may have bit the royal oinker. The other day I walked into a screen saying "cannot load windows blah blah". Get myself a new hard drive, install windows on it, but eventhough the bios shows it, I cant access the Old WD drive at all.

Tried partition manager, the vista disk, but to no avail. Windows wont see it, partition manager says "I/O load error".

So, any chance of me recovering the data off that drive? Only thing I really want is the pictures, MP3's and ISO's are replacable, memories aint. So whats my chances of getting stuff back? Or am I screweded?

Back to mah viking fjord

Thanks in advance,
Weirdwaldo

 

[Billb2]

Try the freeezer trick.
Wrap it in plastic (air tight) and put it in the freezer overnight. Hook it back up quickly. Sometimes that will get you 5-20 minutes use.
R/R as necessary.

 

[Denithor]

BIOS identifies it correctly? But Windows won't? Does the drive make any obvious grinding or clicking noises when it tries to access?

First thing I'd try is a USB adapter (on newegg for about $20) & hook it up externally. I've salvaged more photos/music/etc that way for customers than I care to recall. You might also have better luck accessing the drive on a different computer. I know it doesn't make sense but I've seen that work before.

Enjoy your Fjord!

 

[weirdwaldo]

Yeah the bios will see it, but thats it. And it did make some loud clicks there at the end when I was trying to get it workin.

Its an SATA drive, do they make USB adapters for those? If so im down for trying that, if that dont work then ill do the freezer thing as I recall hearing that many years ago.

 

[DarkRogue]

Yeah, they make SATA>USB cables, but from my experience, maybe it was a cheapo or something, but it wouldn't power 3.5" drives unless I hooked it up to AC or a molex.
You could simply use a SATA USB enclosure and that would work too, but I'm not sure if you have one of those lying around.

If all else fails, perhaps you can try running something like SpinRite and seeing if you can recover anything that way.

Clicking is never a good sound for any hard drive to make.

 

[n7]

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-downloads.htm

I use that at work a lot...it won't work on a drive that cannot spin up, but if it can still spin up, there's a good chance you'll be able to get most of your stuff back, though the process can take a day or two depending on the condition of the drive.