Hard drive failure - any chance of recovery?

[srvblues00]

A hard drive in my Mom's computer crashed last week. It's an old WD 4.3gb manufactured in Nov of 98. She has some documents on there that she needs back if at all possible. The drive clicks with a rhythm of a clock when powered up. When installed as a slave drive, Windoze takes much longer to boot up. When I try to read the drive with Windoze explorer, it tried to read the drive for a long time, and then tells me the drive is not formatted and asks me to format it now. Is there any chance of recovery, or should I just toss the drive and forget about it?

 

[meltdown75]

I would probably try to recover ASAP - while you can. It might be completely pooched soon - the tick of death is a pretty good sign that it is on it's way to FUBAR-dom. I'm a big pimper of trying to run chkdsk /f from DOS first and then seeing if it behaves any better.

 

[Kalvin00]

Freezer?

 

[redbeard1]

To me, at this point, it is time to decide how important the files are to her. As you keep trying things, you are probably doing more damage, making any recovery less likely. A data recovery service like Drivesavers would probably be able to get the data, but at a price. A recovery runs from $500-$3400.

So how important are those files?

 

[srvblues00]

I tried the chkdsk /f on the drive, but it can't perform the check disk operation It's a FAT32 drive, and I only have NTFS drives now. Said it couldn't check a FAT32 volume. Oh well.

I am trying the freezer thing now... drive's cooling off in the freezer. I'll give it another shot tomorrow, but I kinda doubt it will work.

The files are definitely not worth paying a recovery service for retrieval.. if I can't do anything here at home on my own, Mom'll just have to chalk it up as a loss.

Thanks for the input.

 

[montag451]

When you do take the drive out of the freezer, disconnect all your drives except your main hdd, and the cold drive. And do what you have to do as quick as you can.

Good luck

 

[srvblues00]

Well, the freezer didn't help at all. Let it it sit in there for about 2 days, pulled it out, plugged it in, fired up the computer, and it started clicking. Windoze still couldn't read the drive. I guess it's pretty much a lost cause at this point. Thanks for the suggestions, though.