Help! IT Geeks needed!

[vifferman]

While you guys are rabbitting on about laptop HDDs, here's summat you should know. Number 2 Troglodyte last week replaced his HDD, which was only a few months old. It was a Seagate HDD, and had a firmware bug, which instead of unloading the head(s?) after a reasonable amount of inactivity, was doing it after almost every R/W action, so the freakin' drive was frenetically beavering away. His boss put him onto this - and before his drive died completely, he bought a new one, stuck the old one in a caddy, and transferred all the data. He has yet to take the drive back to the supplier, but I reckon he should, seeing it's still relatively new and this is an abnormality.
Apparently, he was running Linux, but this may happen with other O/Ss, and could be the case with many brands of HDD. To check whether this is the case, you can just listen to your drive, and should be able to hear it. Better still, get a smart drive monitoring system, and see what your drive's up to: if it's newish, yet has hundreds or thousands of unloads recorded, it's busy flogging itself to death.

[scracha]

Don't keep spinning it up...it'll only fark it up more. If it's important, get it professionally done but it'll cost you a huge 4 digit sum. If it's not so important, chuck it in a sealed freezer bag and put it in the freezer for 48 hours. Best mount it as a slave drive on another computer and then try getting the data off it. If it's lots of data, wouldn't recommend hooking it up via USB as it takes too farkin long.

UBCD4Win has some very good recovery tools, especially TESTDISK.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec is also worth checking out if you can figure out how to make a bootable disk/cd/usb.

[CookMySock]

Sometimes you can power it off fully, and restart, and just keep doing that.. one time out of 10-100 it will actually boot and you can grab all your important shit off of it before it hand grenades completely.

If the BIOS will detect the drive, then boot a Linux recovery CD over it and have a poke with that.

But yeah that sort of warning usually means good night mary. Check on your PCs and make sure SMART is enabled inthe BIOS - it will warn you of an impending disk disaster,


Steve

[Headbanger]

Don't keep spinning it up...it'll only fark it up more.

This is good advice. If you haven't already then stop messing with the drive, Don't try and boot off it, Unplug it. Do not power it up again until is slaved and your ready to try and find your data. Whether that's with a dedicated app or you just want to try and copy/paste.

Sometimes you can power it off fully, and restart, and just keep doing that.. one time out of 10-100 it will actually boot and you can grab all your important shit off of it before it hand grenades completely.

And this is incredibly shit advice, Never do what he has suggested, and people should jump all over crap like this when anyone puts it forward.Dumb,dumb ,fucking dumb.

[Gubb]

Right.

Old HDD has been taken out of the PC completely, and i've bought a new HDD. It was my C:\ drive that crashed, which all my Photo's, and personal files, and al my applications are on, as well as the OS.

If I can get in touch with someone with a Caddy (which has already been offered privately) can I just copy and paste everything from the old drive to the new one, chuck it in, and go? or do I need to re-install the OS as well?

Cheers for all the advice folks.

[sinfull]

good luck !~!!!!!!

[Headbanger]

You could try and image the drive.

I wouldn't though, I'd just try and grab your documents, You have no idea how long the drive may be accessible for, if its accessible at all.

If it were me, I'd install the OS to the new hd, Then install an app for raw recovery.

I'd fire it all up, and if you can access the personal files just copy and post them over, If not hit it with some recovery software.

[Burtha]

There have been a number of assumptions made, based on the fact that our friend here is using his personal computer for relatively minor stuff, probably using windows etc and isn't using it for scientific breakthrough - if we were wrong, then yes, it would be worth investing getting it to a data recovery expert.

On the basis that the problem was posted on KB, its pretty clear that it is not high value data worth life or lung - and that past experiences tell me that if I was in the district then a CHICK like me could quite easily resolve the situation without all this testosterone flying around.
- hence a small reason I retired from the IT industry in 2000 after so many years of this kind of exuberance.

Most posts here have been very helpful and shouldn't have made the situation worse, faulty heads or not.
If it was at that point, then recovery is most unlikely no matter how experienced you are.
As at that point the HD would need to be disassembled and rebuilt into a temporary casing used by recovery experts and that is why they charge the earth.

If you can run a command prompt and access the data in it this way (either via linux or dos) then you shouldn't need to reinstall an OS, or same as HeadBanger said.

Best of luck and if you need some specific details dealt with PM me.

[Gubb]

Quite right, it's is only Home data, and personal photos that are of value to me. But then again, not worth $1k to get 'em back.

I'm not too sure where the "being a girl" rant comes into play, as far as i'm aware I haven't mentioned anything about prejudice against female IT staff. I was just asking for advice. I don't care if you have a front bum or not.

As for getting to a command prompt. I haven't been able to. And I don't have a windows boot disc (It's a legit copy, just don't have the CD's. Promise), which I suspect may have helped avoid this whole situation.

[Burtha]

I'm not too sure where the "being a girl" rant comes into play, as far as i'm aware I haven't mentioned anything about prejudice against female IT staff. I was just asking for advice. I don't care if you have a front bum or not.

Oh, not you darlink !
Just the odd blown-outta-proportion post and reactions get to me.

As for command prompt - meant from primary drive from new HD you have installed. ie; you've connected a new HD to your primary IDE and your old faulty HD to your secondary IDE.
Is there anything installed on the new primary HD?

[Gubb]

No, the new HDD is blank, so effectively i've got no OS.

[Headbanger]

No, the new HDD is blank, so effectively i've got no OS.

You may want to get UBCD, It has drive imaging software on it, (you cant just copy paste your OS to a new HD,whether within windows or from a command line, You need the boot sector) You just boot of the cd, run the right app and select the HD to image, it will do what it can, Its limitations are its slow, and you will end up with a partition the exact same size as your old hd or the partition that was imaged. No big deal as you can always format the leftover space into another partition.

Ultimate boot cd http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I haven't used it for a number of years as working on endless munted PC's made me want to rape and kill.....


Personally I would still slave it and grab the personal files (even on a friends computer) before trying to image it. A partial image is useless, And I've seen far too many HD's give up the ghost with poor timing.

[Burtha]

Dang - so no boot up then?
easiest solution without having to install of sorts would be to simply load it into an existing PC as a secondary HDD and seeing if it can be read from there.
else next option is install onto new primary - considering you'll probably want a running OS at some point on your PC again anyway, yes? and trying that or what Headbanger said again!

HDDs these days are cheap and consumable - and although in the past I've had to solder some to get them reworking its probably most unlikely that you will recover anything from it now if its a hardware issue
How old is the HDD?
I gather its a segate?

[Gubb]

Dang. Guess I gotta fork out for a new OS as well then. Or can I just download it, and use the same License key from the sticker on the Case?

I'll try Headbangers suggestion, and set it as a Slave to get the pics and personal files off first, if it dies after that, i'm not too concerned.

And yeah, the borked one is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 160Gb. After
Googling it, many people have had similar issues. The new one is a Western Digital 500Gb.

[Blackshear]

Dang. Guess I gotta fork out for a new OS as well then. Or can I just download it, and use the same License key from the sticker on the Case?

I'll try Headbangers suggestion, and set it as a Slave to get the pics and personal files off first, if it dies after that, i'm not too concerned.

And yeah, the borked one is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 160Gb. After
Googling it, many people have had similar issues. The new one is a Western Digital 500Gb.

No need to fork out, silly.
If someone has a CD, you only need your 'existing' CD key from a previous purchase