Best way to revive a dead HDD?

[Rob Williams]

About a month ago, my 120GB Seagate blew.. after only being 18 months old. The only important thing I lost, and didn't back up, was my Outlook file. This has all my contacts, e-mails and serial codes for programs I bought, so I would love to retrieve it.

I have hooked it up and played around with it quite a bit, but the thing will just not boot, or be detected by my BIOS. Even though I currently only have two good HDD's, I hooked the dead one up to my RAID card to see if that would do anything, but it didn't.

Any help would be appreciated.. I would *love* to retrieve those files. A lot of serial codes I lost are to programs I forgot my login to, hehe.

Thanks!

 

[ultragooey]

does it spin up at all? or click? if its a controller failure, you might try to get it to slam back into place by dropping it from about 10-12 inches flat to a hard surface. that worked once for a customer.

 

[Nosebiter]

STOP! Don't power the drive up anymore, you may be damaging the stored data even further. Unplug it asap. If the head crashed or the reader bar snapped you are screwed. However you can mail your drive to a data recovery company and they will extract the data for you, for a charge of course. Here are some data recovery shops to start looking at, there are literally hundreds of shops around the world for this kind of recovery.

http://www.datarecovery.net/
http://www.datarecoverygroup.com/
http://www.dataleach.com/

 

[Rob Williams]

Thanks for the links, and help.

Getting them professionally recovered is one thing I wanted to try to avoid. The file is not *that* important, and it would cost a lot to recover I am sure, due to the fact that the file is 1.5GB.

I *may* try that drop from 10 inches trick.. it does spin up when turned on.. it's just not detecting anything. I tried a different IDE cable too.

 

[brettmar]

Well, if the data is not important, and it spins up, you should debug the drive. I can tell you the easiest way, and provide a debug script for you. *note, if you do this, only have this one drive hooked up. It makes it a lot easier*

first, get a boot disk with the debug utility. I just pulled one from support.dell.com, search for cdenab.exe.

Then, boot to Dos, and type in debug. it should give you the -f prompt. Then do the following:

-F 200 L1000 0
-A CS:100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80
xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110 *just hit enter when you see this prompt*
-G
(some of that is prompt: You see it when you hit enter, like -f -a xxxx:0100, etc.)

Then, reboot to the dos disk, Fdisk, Format, and reload windows! You have just changed the landing zone on your drive back to normal, and specified it's read write pattern.

BTW: On the MOV DX, 80 part, if the drive is a secondary drive, you type MOV DX, 81...and so forth.

 

[brettmar]

Now, if you need to keep the data, this is an odd one...Put the drive in the freezer. Do this for half an hour, and plug it in. What it does I am not sure, but it works 7/10 times. It will only help it for about 2 or 3 days, so when you pull it out, copy everything ASAP.

I have sacrificed 3 drives this way. Sometimes you will get a copy error saying that a 30meg file will be 5646833289 minutes left to copy, but it still does it.

 

[sp1k3]

Rob have u tried any of these tricks?

I, myself, have a old 10gb hd that failed on me before, with same effects as u'res and i still have it. It contains files that were really important back in the day and i still like to retrieve them. So if one of the tricks works, pelase do inform us so least i can give mine a shot.

 

[madstork91]

Took mine to a local comp shop... They charged me about $60 for a lil over a 50gb recovery.

 

[sp1k3]

that's a waste of money if i do it for my comp. i would rather buy a new hd for that much money

 

[Rob Williams]

I tried everything in the thread, and nothing seemed to work.

I also: Cooked it in the oven, threw it in the freezer, dipped it in olive oil [as per an urban myth], kicked a field goal with it..

And it STILL doesn't work. Actually, it's still sitting aside, minding it's own business for now, until I feel like fiddling with it. I can't bring my cheap ole self to pay to recover it professional, and won't, since it's not THAT important.

Just stuff I kick my ass for not backing up :|

 

[PUTALE]

let me get this straight, you said that bios won't detect it? are you saying that when you hook the hd as slave drive, you can't see it at all under windows?
Is the drive completely dead, I mean, sometimes drive might have problem but if you don't boot off it, it maybe accessible under windows. try switch diff cables, I found that sometimes my hd will work on 1 cable while not on others.

if the hd is not even detected under bios, maybe the board under the drive is gone bad. Did you oc your system? if you did, maybe it fried the board. If the platter are fine, you may try just get identical drive and put the new board onto the dead drive and see if that work.

 

[Rob Williams]

When it was first dying, the BIOS would still detect it, and even now, sometimes it will detect it, but it's unable to use it at all. I am unsure whether the HDD needs any power at all for it to detect it though.

I have tired different IDE cables, and nothing seems to work. I am going to try to get a new spare HDD in a few weeks, and at that time I will set my RAID back up. Hopefully it will work somehow then.

 

[Tech-Daddy]

Long shot, but try locating an identical drive and swapping PCB's on the bottom. If it is having a logic problem, swapping to a working board may do the trick. I have heard of this working *once* in my lifetime... and it weas just reciently (in the past month).

If you have nothing to loose, and everything to gain... try and find a drive with the same PCB revision.

Good luck!

 

[PUTALE]

oh, btw, did you change the ide cable or put it on a diff system, I have problem where the system won't recognize a hd but after I change the cable, it works.