HELP - hard drive died

kit

Hi all

Turned computer on tonight and it kindly told me that there was an error. Turns out that one of my hard drives had died....... it happened to be the one with EVERYTHING I want and need saved on it. :mad:

My other half has tried a few things to recover some of my stuff...... however the disc is not spinning at all. It is currently in the freezer!

Any ideas of what to try??

Also - suggestions on a new one? Where to get a good but cheap IDE about 60gb plus?

albertross_2

try defrosting it.

For a new HD, try ebuyer, they also sell Norton Ghost and Acronis Trueimage.

CHR15

If it isn't even spinning up, you may well be out of luck.

There are recovery companies who could get the stuff off, but they will want top dollar to do it!!

Ebuyer is generally the cheapest online store to get hard drives.

They have an 80GB Western Digital drive for £26 (+ postage)

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/23275

You could look for an identical drive to yours on ebay and swap out the controller card, bit of a long shot but could work.


The freezer trick is a desperate measure but it does bring results, not normally to drives which won't spin up, normally with drives which spin but aren't recognised. Good luck with that!

devizes18193

As daft as this will seem give it a loght whack in the middle with a screwdriver handel . Some times I'ver known them to spin up for a bit . If it kackerd anyway you've nowt to lose

sadiefoz

Sorry,
But that things officialy useless, Data recovery firms wil be able to salvage SOME info but as CHR15 said they charge top dollar


https://www.scan.co.uk

john_kent

yet again someone who relies on no backup

I see this all the time in my job. Instead of flogging anti virus , maybe the retailers should try and sell backup services

Little_John

Dont try to use the disk untill you have system you can transfer the stuff to.

we know in an ideal world you would power the drive up and boot windows burn a dvd with all your stuff an and then replace the drive. replace the drive then connect your old drive and transfer your stuff to the new drive. go for the most important stuff first the freezer trick and most of the other tricks only give you limited time to access the drive.

Avoriaz

john_kent wrote:

yet again someone who relies on no backup

I see this all the time in my job. Instead of flogging anti virus , maybe the retailers should try and sell backup services

It is hard to have too much sympathy.

Sorry Kit, but surely you knew that backups are absolutely essential?

Standalone disks, DVDs etc are relatively cheap. You can even save essential data on the web at very low or zero costs.

kit

Avoriaz wrote:

It is hard to have too much sympathy.

Sorry Kit, but surely you knew that backups are absolutely essential?

Standalone disks, DVDs etc are relatively cheap. You can even save essential data on the web at very low or zero costs.

I didnt post on here to get sympathy; I posted to get advice.

PeteHerts

When you put the drive back in if you can get to command line then type in chkdsk then enter and see if that will run