Where to get data recovered from dead HDD

hebangsthedrums

Hi peeps

Im after any tips or recommendations. I bought a hard drive from ebay in my first year of uni which i filled with about 100 gig (120 capacity). Anway it failed last november and ive only been able to afford a new one now. I want to know if the data is still ok to transfer (I assume it is) and how much this would cost. I rang a local firm who quoted me £100 :eek: and im sure from ringing around just after it broke pc world is about 50 squid. Anywhere cheaper? Cheers

albertross_2

depends what wrong with it, if the disk isn't spinning, you'll be lucky to get anything back for £100, hard disk recovery is time consuming business.., and isn't cheap.. £100 is too cheap imo..

If the disk is recognisable by the bios and spinning, you may be able to do it yourself. Depends if it is a logical or physical disk corruption.

Try plugging it in as a slave into a working PC.

hebangsthedrums

It was a slave in my pc at uni then stopped being available ocassionally,m then the drive disappeared. (shortcut was there but just said cannot find location). i tried it in the family pc last night and nothing

albertross_2

does the bios recognise it, does it spin?

John_Gray

Just to cheer you up, someone I know wanted to recover documents and spreadsheets which had been deleted from a disk, and the disk had then been used to create a few other files.

The quote from a data recovery firm was £4000, without any guarantees of success...

John

albertross_2

JG,

I have used this to recover stuff after a format and reinstalled o/s

http://www.finaldata.com/sub_products/products_1.asp?p_no=5&pc1_code=winc

cheaper than 4000..

and there are many freeware undeleters available if the HD hasn't been formatted (I'm sure you know that already).

pcinspector, freeundelete, restoration etc..

hebangsthedrums

albertross wrote:

does the bios recognise it, does it spin?

I have no idea what any of that means I will try again tonight and post what the computer said. The trouble is th epc here is not very clear on the inside as to what plugs in where. My other one had one free grey bit from the flat wire thing, which goes in the back and one white plastic thing with lots of coloure dwires (power). The home pc has two of each and their cable tied in a strange way so it might be that that i am doing wrong. When it worked before i asked a techie flatmate and he told me to plug in above and that this would be a 'slave drive'

albertross_2

when you switch a PC on, a screen comes up that says press (del, esc, F1, F2) to enter bios, if you press that there are some screens to page through, one of them should be eide channels, usually you have two cables with upto two connectors on each, the one on the end is the primary hd, and the one in the middle is the slave.

you may also have to set a little jumper on the hard disk to tell the PC if the disk is a master, slave or cable select (automatic detection), they are usually labelled CSM

If you tell the bios to search for your hard disk, and it finds it on boot, then it proves that the electronics on the hard disk are working..

the next bit to check is is it spinning.

then can you read anything off it.

if it is not seen in the bios, and not spinning you aren't going to be able to do anything with it, and will probably have to spend 100's to get the data back (I'm suspicious of the firms that say they can do this for £100)..

John_Gray

Yes, I was aware of several of those data recovery utilities -- but I only gave the first half of the story, up to the point where they were picked up off the floor...! :eek:

John

justpaper

it all depends how bad its damaged,.. i can understand John Gray's point its seems like that hhd was damaged to a point where it couldnt be read from a pc,..

anyways back too the poster,..
ok above is a tiny hard drive,. but thats what a harddrive loooks like inside, if u can hear it spinning (whirring noise) hten that means the disc is ok ( the shinny thing in the pic) then theres the needle if u can hear it crackle then the needles had it ,.. if its damaged that much u would have to pay a good deal of money to get it fixed,.

anyways if u can put it as Slave (theres a Jumper on the back of the harddrive ,. where the power plugs into.,. just set the jumper too the right point ,..diagram is on the harddrive,) and if u can find it in dos,. just run this chkdsk /r ,.. so if my drive letter was k: ,.. i would put this in dos,..

K:chkdsk /r

this should fix it if its only a software problem,. might take a while but theres a progress report on screen so u know its doing it,.