6 replies to this topic

[SynoAngel]

Hi All,

I have had PC issues for about a month now, so far had to replace Motherboard, CPU. Also had 2 power supplies blow up in the interum. Its turns out that once I got it going that my personal drive (SATA2) is not recognised in the bios (if its connected it actually stops the other drives from being recognised). I have removed the drive and the PC works great (thanks Synetrix for the parts), if I connect it as a USB external HD the PC does not recognize it either. I have a registered copy of "recover my files", but again it fails to find the drive and thus the files.

Any comments or help is very much appreciated on how to recover the drive and or the files.

Daniel

[MrOrange]

Does the drive power/spin up?

If it's spinning as a USB device, I'd try using the program Get Data Back for NTFS - It can read deleted/corrupt partitions. Can run for free to see what you can recover, and then a small fee if you wish to recover anything. There are freeware programs out there but I have always had good success with this program where some of the others haven't worked nearly as well.

If it's not spinning, or not even detected as a drive in the above step, then it's past the point we can help really. Could be a circuit board failure or a motor failure. Once it gets to this point you really have to take it to a specialised data recovery agent, could easily cost over $1000, and even quite a bit more for some partcularly tricky drives.

There's all sorts of DIY rememdies you can try on the net too, like freezing the drive, but these are rarely successful and can often damage it more than it already is.

Most people I deal with who have drive failures, tell me the data is important, until they get the quote back for recovery - Always best to assume a HDD will fail and have suitable backups in place. Online (offsite) backups are cheap and a great safeguard for home users.

[SynoAngel]

Thanks Mr Orange,

Tried the program which you suggested but does not find this drive. It is certainly on, and reactive to turning it on/off. I am 80% sure that the drive is spinning, before my system crash I was messing around with the compatibility of a program on the drive (ie I selected Windows 95 mode on the file) could this be the cause of the hard drive failure? The next day when I tried to turn on the PC all hell broke loose.

Daniel

[tha_krust]

its cactus bro

[MrOrange]

Yes, unfortunately repairing physical or mecahnical damage to a drive is the realm of specialised data recovery agents.

.. and as I said earlier, professional recovery is very expensive. By all means, get a second opinion but really the only thing a home user could hope to recover from is soft failure, such as file table corruption, missing partitions, formatted partitions / drives or deleted files.

If the data is very imporant to you, then I suggest contacting as many data recovery companies you can find on google for quotes (You'll need to consider Australia wide to get a competitive price). You may get lucky and have a particularly common drive that just happens to be super easy to replace board / move platters... Can't hurt to ask, but do brace yourself

[golden_dase]

Daniel, unfortunately what Mr OJ is saying is correct... not something you can do/solve at home..

[SynoAngel]

Thanks for the comments, I think I knew it was dead but I wanted to check every box first. Bloody Seagate! Atleast its under warranty, but it wont matter as I am upgrading to a couple of WD HD, will use one as a mirrored drive. Will drop this one over to my cousins to have a go, he was able to extract my documents from a HD which had a mechanical failure, this one could be anything!

Daniel