Hard Drive Failure - Data Recovery Help

[Chili]

So last week my media drive, aka my 2nd internal hard drive, decided to take a dive and go down for the count. This drive houses all of my pictures and music and like a complete moron I did not back any of it up on DVD’s.

Now the drive still shows up in my BIOS so it is not completely gone. So I ran Spinrite on it and it came back with a critical error, I know I need to bring in the big time geeks on this one.

Does anyone know of a good computer repair / hard drive recovery place where I can bring the hard drive in to see if they can recover some of my data? I was thinking of Milwaukee PC but didn’t know if anyone else knew of some other reliable places that do this type of work.

Thanks!

[Gwaki]

Quick question.  Does it click when you turn it on?  If so it could cost a couple thousand of dollars to fix because the disk would have to be manually spun to be read

[mu_hilltopper]

I've had a lot of experience in this area .. I've tried Spinrite on 5-6 failed drives at work.  So far, ZERO success rate.

Here's something you can try.  Take out the bad drive and stick it in the freezer for 15 minutes.

I kid you not. 

I've tried this on 4-5 drives, and was successful about half of those times .. you have to work quickly, though, as the drive will quickly heat back up.  Get the data off asap.

Worth a try.

Other than that .. you will pay big bucks to have a data repair specialist retrieve the data .. we've done it at work a couple times, and the fee was around $1500.  Brutal.  So ask yourself, is your porn collection worth that much?

[Chili]

There has been zero clicking on the drive. I have heard of the freezer thing before but just laughed it off. But it is worth a try. How much time do you have to get the information off?

I was thinking of getting a quote from Milwaukee PC first. I really only care about my digitial pictures - the music and such can all be found again.

[mu_hilltopper]

Looks like it's $300 from this page:

http://milwaukeepc.com/OffsiteBackup.asp

.. Looks like MilwaukeePC just sends them out to another off-site place.  Might as well just avoid the middle man, find a specialist on the internet.

Gotta back up your stuff!

.. I have a simple backup protocol.  I have a desktop and a laptop.  I map drives back and forth, and run a backup program (free, SyncBack) .. so all my data exists on both machines.  No backup CDs/DVDs .. just good old hard-drives on two separate machines.

[Chili]

My friend who is an IT guy is trying the freezer thing tonight. I will let you know happens. The drive is already freezing and he has fast processor to try and get the pics off as fast as possible. From what we could gather on the net, you get about 30 minutes of time to move stuff off. God I hope this works!

I don't think it is worth $300 to get my stuff off. We shall see though.

[mu_hilltopper]

As I said .. I've tried the freezer thing maybe 5 times .. twice it was successful for, I dunno .. 5-10 minutes.  I'd be surprised if it survived 30 minutes .. a spinning drive xferring a bunch of data off heats up quickly.

[Chili]

Update time. I froze the drive for 4 hours and got the same I/O Disk Error as I did earlier when it first crashed. This is what I know so far. When we rebooted the cpu, we did it using a USB connection to the bad drive so the cpu thought it was an external hard drive. it showed up as the "L" like it is supposed to. When we tried to access it, the previous mentioned error message showed up. so windows is seeing the drive but it is seeing it as an unformatted drive.

we also know the drive is spinning and there is no clicking or such. so if nothing works, i am thinking of reformatting the drive then using a different recovery program specifically for drives that have been reformatted.

I come to the conclusion that it is not worth $300+ to get pics. Any knowledge anyone has would be outstanding.

[mu_hilltopper]

4 hours?  Holy crap.  I would have thought you would have frozen it solid .. it's not air tight, and condensation forms .. 4 hours would have frozen that vapor on all sorts of parts.

(I said 15 minutes, btw.)

Reformatting would be the very last thing I'd do. 

I think the next thing would be to get a utility that does FAT recovery.  Just googled that .. this might help, although I can't say I've used it:

http://www.datadoctor.in/data-recovery-software/fat-data-recovery-software.html

.. Although you didn't say if it was FAT or NTFS. 

Looks like they have both.

http://www.datadoctor.in/data-recovery-software/ntfs-data-recovery-software.html

[Chili]

We (my friend who is an IT guy for a school district and I) did some googling of the freezer method and a lot of people have said go as long as 24 hrs. we have it double wrapped. i guess the drive is no longer a NFTS but is now seen as RAW.

Also, I tried using photorec and testdsk to no avail.

What is pissing me off the most is that this all sprung during an auto download and install of the new Blackberry software w/ Roxio. I am also getting a Roxio error now too on main CPU.