Hard Drive Data Recovery

[Jim Saueressig]

Have any of you had experience with anyone that is not multi hundreds of dollars to recover data? Last nights insane lightning killed my picture and backup drive.....

All the pictures taken this year are on that thing and while I can live without the mp3's and movies the pics are hurting.....
So far I have had quotes from 200$ if Level 1 recovery to $500/$1700 if they have to open it.....

 

[Dan Robinson]

Is it an internal or external drive? I had an external drive die last month, and I was able to take apart the casing, remove the drive inside (a standard SATA drive) and hook it directly into my PC's internal SATA slot. If it's an internal drive, try hooking it up to another computer - if you're lucky, the IDE controller (or SATA, if it's a newer PC) might be what is damaged.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

If it's an internal drive, it matters what's 'broken'. Does the hard drive still spin up when you turn on the computer? Is the hard drive recognizeable, but the operating system just thinks it's empty (possible partition table corruption)? If the thing doesn't even power on, then you'll probably have to spend a good chunk of change to get any data off it. If it spins up, but doesn't show you any of the data, there are some utilities out there that may help you recover the data. I know I've had partition issues that I was able to solve by booting into Knoppix recovery CD, and I've retrieved "deleted" files that were accidentally "deleted" with the help of a file recovery program. (When you delete a file, even "permenantly", the data are typically still on the hard drive, but you, essentially, delete the "index reference" to it... Imagine a book with an index; deleting a file essentially just deletes the index reference to the data, though the data are typically still on the hard drive until they are overwritten).

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Its an internal 3.5 Maxtor EIDE 120 GiG ATA 133

Last night it had CRC errors and wouldn't download the camera so I slept a few hours on it and got up and tried deleting junk I didn't need as it was reading the drive and was near full but it was still erroring on certain files (CRC) I had to reboot when it stopped responding and got side tracked and windows started a disk check for the errors on boot up. I rebooted that because that can kill files if I remember right and it never came back from the reboot, It just clicks and beeps alternatively. I placed it in my other computer as a slave as (as it was here as it used to be in that computer as the backup before this one anyways) and it wouldn't run either and somehow it even took out that computer now it wont boot the main drive on that one. It still just beeped and clicked.

The fact I cannot get a spin up now kinda leaves me out of any type of software recovery.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

I know this sounds crazy, but try freezing it in the freezer for a few hours. Then hook it up and see if it spins up. If it does, make sure you are prepared to copy every single file you want off it. You probably won't get it to start again after that. It's typically a "One Shot" deal when they die like that.

 

[Jim Saueressig]

I know this sounds crazy, but try freezing it in the freezer for a few hours. Then hook it up and see if it spins up. If it does, make sure you are prepared to copy every single file you want off it. You probably won't get it to start again after that. It's typically a "One Shot" deal when they die like that.

LMAO. You made me google that insane idea.... my first concern was condensation which is covered..... LOL

Freezing a hard drive: Myth or Reality?

 

[Chris White]

Here's what I do;

Logical Failure
- I remove the drive from the PC, insert a new one that's much bigger.
- If it's the OS partition I begin re-installation while I recover the lost drive.
- I place the drive into an external drive enclosure (newegg.com $10-$20 SATA/IDE=>USB2/FIREWIRE) and do a 'create image' (using r-studio) of the lost hard-drive a one time read of everything it can read. Once the image is created I can then open it, scan it, recover all files, etc. Depending on what the issue is you might get a complete image of the harddrive back, a bunch of files with directories with made up folder names $$$FOLDER0001, with the original files still in it, etc.
- If their is no damage to the drive and it's large capacity I will reuse it as a network storage drive, if it's smaller I will try and sell it in the external enclosure as an external HD storage solution, if it's small I will run military grade wiping software and ask if anyone at work wants it, or recycle it (but, everyone always grabs it)

Mechanical Failure
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ - best in the business if they can't recover it no one can

Backups
I use a system of SyncBackSE installations to make backups to multiple physical computers within my home, as well as off-site storage via FTP. I only backup data files not programs(for instance I don't backup photoshop, I backup photos). I store license information and electronic delivery software in a separate folder that is backed up. SyncBackSE runs scheduled daily to run at night.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I know this sounds crazy, but try freezing it in the freezer for a few hours. Then hook it up and see if it spins up. If it does, make sure you are prepared to copy every single file you want off it. You probably won't get it to start again after that. It's typically a "One Shot" deal when they die like that.

I've had 2 laptop (2.5") hard drives that got the "click of death". In both cases, the ONLY way to access the drives was to put them in the freezer for 6-7 hours, before either putting them into a 2.5" external enclosure or back into the laptop to copy data onto another hard drive or to burn data onto a CDR/DVDR. I was a little worried about condensation problems, but I figured it was my last shot anyway. So, I don't know about the large-scale track record of this technique, and I assume it heavily depends upon the cause of the problem, but, in my experience with the "click of death", the freezer method has worked quite well.

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Its in the freezer now, lol, at this point if I can recover my pics the rest I can do without. I would even go as far as finding another identical drive and swapping whatever was needed just to get an hour of recovery time out of it.

My MB's have always had raid, now I am thinking mirroring...

 

[Ben Holcomb]

I don't bother with mirroring. I have all my data stored on a Linux system and I have another Linux system that I got from the Michigan State Surplus store (It's a P3 600 with 512mb ram) with 4 160GB drives in it which I've setup LVM on. You could easily do it with 1 gigantic (1tb?) drive too - Basically I set it up so it rsyncs everything over hourly. I have hourly backups on different physical drives in case anything were to fail......

And if I catch the file deletion before the next backup runs, I have anything I mistakenly delete.

 

[beaudodson]

Have any of you had experience with anyone that is not multi hundreds of dollars to recover data? Last nights insane lightning killed my picture and backup drive.....

All the pictures taken this year are on that thing and while I can live without the mp3's and movies the pics are hurting.....
So far I have had quotes from 200$ if Level 1 recovery to $500/$1700 if they have to open it.....

I lost a drive last week with over 10000 photos. It was my backup drive. Unfortunately I had not backed up that drive in some time. Best Buy sent it off to some "secret location". It will end up costing over $1500 to repair and save all of the data.

Best idea...get one of those dual backup systems. That way your backup can be backed up. You can also buy ghost drives for your computer that will back up your data.

Redundancy is your friend,

 

[John Wetter]

So, basically the answer is no, if you can't get the files off after freezing it, which I personally think the odds are low, you won't get your data back without the services of a recovery outfit like OnTrack (Who I would completely recommned, I've used them). Be prepared to pay ~$600-800 though.

After you have your data back from this, or have kissed it goodbye, then start talking backup.

Personally, my computer has a RAID setup and I back up my life-or-death data to my wife's computer each night. Then about every other week we load our necessary data onto an external drive and take it to my brother's place. I feel fairly safe with that setup.

-John

 

[Dan Robinson]

I always buy hard drives in pairs these days - one primary and its backup. I have multiple backup drives at relatives' houses in different states, which I update whenever I visit.

With my entire professional life - photos, video and web sites (personal and my work clients) - all on hard drives, I would never recover from losing everything in a crash. Don't even want to think about that, so I backup with fervor.

With photos and video all digital these days, backups are a must. I just hope we don't have some catastrophic geomagnetic event that corrupts all mass storage devices, or else I'm in trouble! I could back up everything to DVDs to prevent that, but it would take hundreds of them.

 

[Jim Saueressig]

I used to do all drives in pairs and then I just didn't buy any for a long while.... I had backups through July of last year and then really did few pictures until this April(ish) and sadly I have been so busy I just forgot to backup though I have been thinking of upgrading to SATA 3 drives as this computer only took 2 IDE's but just hadn't gotten that far yet.

The cheapest I found was $199 (level 1) if its simple and $500 (Level 2) if they have to clean room it.

 

[Jason Boggs]

I know this doesn't help with hard drive failure, but after a chase, I like to transfer my best images and other various data to a USB drive. You can get an 8 gig drive for pretty cheap.

USB DRIVE