Are there any software tools available to a layman to reach into the bowels of a non-performing hard drive?
I just built a new computer for the first time and ironically none of the problems I feared occurred, but then this happens with *old *equipment. :smack:
I have a hard drive that I have been using in an external enclosure as a USB device. (It is a Western Digital Ultra ATA 300G, maybe 4 years old.) Today the red light on the enclosure came on and the drive starting making a pinging noise every couple of seconds, as if a little ball bearing were bouncing, and the computer no longer sees the drive. It is humming indicating the drive spins up. I do not hear a clicking, which is what I’m more used to hearing for head movement, just the pinging.
I back up my data periodically but have still probably lost 1-2 weeks’ worth of stuff. I would be willing to spend some money to have a pro retrieve the data but would rather spend that amount on a tool I can use myself, perhaps something that can address the disk at a lower level, bypassing the OS. Although I understand the principles I’ve never done it so I don’t know easy or risky such tools might be to use, if they exist at all.
But I figure the pros must use something, so I could use the same thing, up to a point. (If a platter is damaged no way am I going to open that case up.)
BTW my next diagnostic step is to either try the drive in another enclosure, in case it’s the controller and not the drive, or install it to the new PC.
There is no magic software that is going to recover data from a drive with a severe problem. A drive that makes unusual mechanical noises probably has a severe problem. When I’ve seen people do data recovery, they either moved the platters to a working drive or replaced the defective parts with those from a working drive. This requires an extra working drive, identical to the one that is broken. If the platters have been damaged, it’s game over.
Any software solution is still an OS of sorts, just not windows. There are software solutions that can read through things like corrupt partitions but if you have noise coming out of it, its probably a physical failure of some sort. These types of failures can be handled by a tech saavy novice who is willing to take the time and care and do alot of reading. They are generally not worth the time, effort, and money unless you have data that would take alot of time and effort to rebuild. It usually involves cannibalizing another drive or two of the same model to rebuild one working drive. Not for the lacking in patience or light of wallet.
I’m probably screwed, then. It’s not worth more than $100 or so to retrieve the data. I’m not even positive what might be there that I don’t have backed up.
As it happens, I *do *have an identical drive that I bought a week after the first one. But I’m in no mood to end up with *two *nonworking drives. And don’t you need to do that kind of work in a “clean room”? A speck of dust under the head can scratch it, flaking of oxide, which scratches some more, until you get this kind of H-bomb chain reaction leading to a head crash.
Wull, yeah, but I was expecting that tools exist that allow you to address sector/track addresses instead of going through a file system.
I guess I’ve been lucky. This is the first catastrophic disk failure I’ve had, ever, and I have my data backed up. (Once I had a disk start to mark bad sectors all over the place until the disk was virtually unusable but at least it happened gradually.)
I can’t find one right now, but I’ve heard of people using the bathroom and running the shower to create a “clean” room, the idea being that water droplets absorb dust and then settle.
From some guides like this it’s certainly been done by (reasonably careful and skilled) amateurs before.
If your system can still “see” the drive, i.e. it appears as equipment, but does not show up as a drive, you can recover your data using any number of tools. I use getdataback, which is an excellent program.
If the drive just clicks, and your computer won’t see it at all… Well, there’s some shiny bits inside that you can make lovely sun-catchers with.
I’ve seen it done in an ordinary office, several times. It may be bad for the long term health of the drive, but we didn’t care since we just wanted to recover the data from the drive before we threw it away.
The most sophisticated program for drive repair I use is HDD Regenerator. It’ll “fix” bad sectors in many cases. (I get a bit over 50% repair of whole drives. At least 80% fixed overall.)
Sometimes the clicking is caused by the drive trying to read and re-read a bad sector. If that is the case, then HDD Regenerator might work for you. If the clicking is caused by issues with the head, well, that’s bad.
Note that you can demo the program for free and see if can do something.
I had a major HD failure which I fixed by a temporary swap of the controller board with one from an identical HD, after extensive Googling identified board failure as the probable cause. Didn’t harm the swapped board, and I used the donor drive for several years with no problems after swapping the board back. (Freezing the drive apparently sometimes gets it to work again for a short time if it’s a hardware problem of certain kinds.)
I used a program called GetDataBack to recover most of the files, but some had been damaged by the crash. There are other similar programs out there, but you’re likely going to lose some files even if you can get the drive running again.
I now run an automated back up of everything to an external drive daily.
Note that it can be used to produce a bootable disc (floppy or CD) and then that can be run on any standard x86 PC. Maybe you need an XP or older PC to produce the boot disc, but from there OS doesn’t matter. In fact, I suspect that you can still make the boot disc under Vista, you just can’t run the disc check while Vista is running.
