Recover Data from Hard Drive

[superlyduper]

I have a hitachi 400gb sata 3.5 drive that I use for storage (everything I have since pretty much when I first got a computer.) I used it in an external enclosure, and one day when I came back it did not work (it would spin up but windows would not recognize anything.) When I finally got to take it home to my desktop to take the drive out of the enclosure, it spun up, the raid controller bios screen (that comes after the regular bios boot screen) seemed to recognize it with the right model number and with ~372gb, but the computer would always freeze before it would boot up. Now, it recognizes it with weird symbols and arrows, and as 1gb. It still spins up.

What can I do to figure out what is wrong? It spins up, so would putting it in the freeze do nothing? Maybe I could replace the electronics on the board (but are the files corrupted?) I tried the recovery console but I can never load the SATA drivers by pressing F6 (I have a NF7-S-v2.0) I tried booting to ubuntu live cd, but it gave an error when trying to configure the sata drive.

Any ideas?

 

[DrGreen2007]

Id put it back into the USB enclosure and try to run getdataback from runtime.org on it to see whats recoverable.

 

[RebateMonger]

MyHardDriveDied.com is the best site I know of that discusses the technical details of hard drive data recovery. Check out the 70 minutes of Youtube.com videos on hard drive repair.

There's also a discussion of GetDataBack and DiskExplorer on this page on the same site. GetDataBack is useful if you can mostly read the disk, while DiskExplorer is more useful with badly damaged disks.

As pointed out on MyHardDriveDied.com, next time, you'll find it much cheaper and easier to just keep backups. Data recovery sucks.

 

[superlyduper]

I got those tools (and a bunch of other ones), but the problem is the drive does not show up in windows anymore.

 

[Kyanzes]

If you really have important / long to get again stuff on the 400GB then you could try to get a HDD that has the same panel your hdd does and try and swap them. Ofc if it's a mechanical failure then you would need a pro witha lab to take the stuff from the HDD. If it's the panel then you still have a chance.

 

[superlyduper]

I've started looking for drives on ebay, but how would i know if its a mechanical failure or a panel failure (or if the formatting got corrupted?)

 

[RebateMonger]

Hitachi drives are likely all warranted for three years. 400GB drives haven't even been out that long. So all Hitachi 400GB drives will still be under warranty. The only ones you'll find on eBay will be fully-functional drives, probably for "near-new" price.

 

[superlyduper]

If I send it in with warranty, will they send it back with my data on it? I'm not looking to salvage the drive, just the data.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: superlyduper
If I send it in with warranty, will they send it back with my data on it? I'm not looking to salvage the drive, just the data.

No. They'll erase it or destroy the drive and they'll send you a different drive.

 

[Laputa]

PM you some info if needed.