www.deadharddrive.com

[Aaron]

Just had my first hard drive failure; the drive in question was a secondary drive that I used to store all of my data. I never backed much up because I figured if any drive were to fail it would be the separate drive that the O/S was running on. WRONG. I have over 16GB of photos, 60GB of music, etc, etc and I NEED to recover this data (photos at the very least). If this means paying $$$$ then I will have to do so but I'm hoping that there is another way...

Drive: Seagate Barracuda ST3160023A, 7200.7, 160GB IDE.

Symptoms: Drive still will spin/read, but makes a very loud/piercing clicking sound (the best way to describe it is similar to the read sound of a very old hard drive, back when they used to be noisy machines, except much louder). I can get the drive to come up in Windows when using an external USB case, and can see all folders and files so I know the data is still there. However, copying files off is painfully slow so I'll need to get creative if I have any chance of recovering most if not all of the needed data. I have tried the freezer trick and it seems to speed up access for a few minutes but the noise is still present and transfer is still quite slow.

My questions are:

1. What is most probable diagnosis? I would figure this is a mechanical failure and replacing the PCB would not help...
2. What would be the best approach to getting the data off this drive without losing any?
3. Do they have software specifically designed for this case (retrieving data slowly from a physically damaged drive)? It seems there are many programs available for logical damage, lost, or deleted data...(I have a copy of "Recover My Files" if that would be of use).

Any help would be very much appreciated.

[Kit]

1. Obviously you have a bad head read information from the surface. This is part of the problem for this model. Replacing the motherboard electronics will not help.
2. The best way to pay the company to restore the data. The fact is that, with each attempting to read data from such a hard disk, decreasing the chances to get fully all the information. Head hard drive from bad to worse to read the information and if continue to try to be deducted, the head just stop reading and get the information would be even more difficult and expensive.
Companies that engage in data recovery have special programs that can be deducted hard drives with this problem fairly quickly and completely. If we decide to do so themselves hard drive - in no case did not connect it to the windows because the windows did not commit a lot of unnecessary and dangerous readings from the disc, it could kill him prematurely. You need to find a program that you can copy a disk sector for the sector to another disk. Perhaps this can be done in Linux.

[Aaron]

Thanks for the response. So if I am understanding correctly, I should find some software that will allow me to take a sequential image of the drive (block by block) and copy this to a healthy hard drive to recover the data. Any recommendations on Windows programs that are designed to do this? I will install linux on another partition if I need to. Thanks again.

[harddrivespecialist]

Aaron,

Unfortunately those programs are very expensive and they come with very expensive equipment. You looking at $10,000 minimum, plus time to learn it.

At the moment it could be relatively inexpensive to get your data back, but you can make things worth by scanning or tempering with your drive.

I had many cases when customer did not want to pay few hundred dollars for data recovery service and tryed to handle that problem on their own. Some of them came back with a bigger problem then original, which cost them much more money.
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www.datarecoveryne.com

[Kit]