Buggered Hard Drive Question ...

sWiZzLe · 17 Jan 2010 at 18:38

Its an old IDE from an external Iomega drive. It has around 200gb i need to get off it

I can see it in the bios but nowhere else. I have tried using Spinrite, but it does not detect it.

It powers up and spins, but sounds stuck. Any ideas on how to gain access to it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Edit: hmm maybe i could load up Spinrite, then connect the drive.... might try that!

MikeHunt79 · 17 Jan 2010 at 18:58

I'm trying to do something similar with a laptop HD.

Try leaving the machine booted up for 10 mins, it can sometimes detect the HD after some time...

hoppyintheuk · 17 Jan 2010 at 19:14

A few years ago, I had something similar. The way I got round it was to put it in the freezer for half an hour. Then connect it up and get the data off before it got warm. :-)

Anth · 17 Jan 2010 at 19:34

hoppyintheuk said:
A few years ago, I had something similar. The way I got round it was to put it in the freezer for half an hour. Then connect it up and get the data off before it got warm.

That is what I was going to say.

Just get a air tight food bag, put the hard drive in and seal the food bag up and leave it in the freezer for 30 mins.

Do not just put the bare drive in the freezer without it enclosed in something.

Also has the OP tried the drive inside a USB external enclosure?

rz30 · 17 Jan 2010 at 19:38

Your options are.

1) Freezer trick, heard of it, never tried it, some say it works for a short time.
2) Try booting up a linux live cd and see it it picks it up, you never know
3) Other long shot, but try putting the drive in a usb caddy and see if it is detected
4) Watch these videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdwWI5gpFc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul97jWv2PKY&feature=related

hoppyintheuk · 17 Jan 2010 at 19:38

I got about 30 mins out of it, when I reconnected it to the pc. Luckily, it was enough to copy the data across.

sWiZzLe · 19 Jan 2010 at 12:58

Thanks, i'll give the freezing thing a go

I had a look at those links and came across an interesting video showing what causes the 'click of death' although my drive does not sound like this.

Then i found this rather amusing one: Stop a Clicking Hard Disk

MikeHunt79 · 19 Jan 2010 at 13:22

Anyone know hot to get data from a HD which does not have a click of death?

I'm trying to recover data from a HD with bad blocks, and the partition shows up as RAW instead of NTFS!

sWiZzLe · 19 Jan 2010 at 13:34

GetDataBack NTFS should do it, my friend has had similar problems and that always works for him