Hi all,
Story to follow:
My father was using an older HP desktop to record his vinyl records. A casual "Have you made a backup?" from me got a "yeah I'll sort that out soon" reply.
..so the next week Windows blue screens on boot. Restarting, and the drive isn't detected by the BIOS, but there's the click of death now coming from it.
Considering the potential for a data recovery company to charge £400+ for a recovery, my father opted to merely start again with the recordings. But, since there was no real worry about trashing the drive, I figured I'd give a try to the freezer trick.
My logic being that the way things stood the drive couldn't finish its spin up routine without clicking, it wasn't being detected by the BIOS on any machine I tried it in, the data could all be recovered without the need for that drive.. so if I bricked it even further, we would be in exactly the same state.
I wrapped the drive first in paper towels (debatable move there.. aim was to keep the drive condensation free when it was removed from the freezer & became the coldest item in the room), and then placed the mummified drive in an anti static bag... With hindsight as I type this, that sounds like the most useless move in the world actually. *Facepalms*
Either way, it was left in the freezer for 24 hours. When I removed it, I connected it to the IDE header on my IP-35 board. It (with a couple of kur-clicks) managed to be recognised by the controller. Windows could see the partition table, but couldn't identify the main partition as NTFS, and instead insisted I needed to format it. Think not.
So, I rebooted into Ubuntu, and first tried to mount it:
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/blah
... no dice, NTFS-3G winced at the corruption and refused to budge.
Back in the freezer went the drive, while I searched for my next move. In searching, I found testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk). A sudo apt-get install testdisk later, I pointed Testdisk at my ailing drive and.. with a little delay (and a few clicks / crunches from the drive) it gave me a directory listing.
I headed to the folder containing the recordings and instructed testdisk to dump the data to another disk in my machine.
It only went and did it! It's recovered about 60% of the data (30gb total recovered) which is quite an impressive amount considering the number of errors that drive was throwing out (Not to mention its crunching and clicking). I didn't take any steps to keep the drive cool; after the 4-5 hour recovery period it was up to about 40c.
Either way, for me in this circumstance, the freezer trick helped my drive to complete its spin up routine, and testdisk managed to get the data back.
...and I'm sat here amazed and bemused! Hope this helps someone else, or if nothing else makes you all run your backups
Story to follow:
My father was using an older HP desktop to record his vinyl records. A casual "Have you made a backup?" from me got a "yeah I'll sort that out soon" reply.
..so the next week Windows blue screens on boot. Restarting, and the drive isn't detected by the BIOS, but there's the click of death now coming from it.
Considering the potential for a data recovery company to charge £400+ for a recovery, my father opted to merely start again with the recordings. But, since there was no real worry about trashing the drive, I figured I'd give a try to the freezer trick.
My logic being that the way things stood the drive couldn't finish its spin up routine without clicking, it wasn't being detected by the BIOS on any machine I tried it in, the data could all be recovered without the need for that drive.. so if I bricked it even further, we would be in exactly the same state.
I wrapped the drive first in paper towels (debatable move there.. aim was to keep the drive condensation free when it was removed from the freezer & became the coldest item in the room), and then placed the mummified drive in an anti static bag... With hindsight as I type this, that sounds like the most useless move in the world actually. *Facepalms*
Either way, it was left in the freezer for 24 hours. When I removed it, I connected it to the IDE header on my IP-35 board. It (with a couple of kur-clicks) managed to be recognised by the controller. Windows could see the partition table, but couldn't identify the main partition as NTFS, and instead insisted I needed to format it. Think not.
So, I rebooted into Ubuntu, and first tried to mount it:
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/blah
... no dice, NTFS-3G winced at the corruption and refused to budge.
Back in the freezer went the drive, while I searched for my next move. In searching, I found testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk). A sudo apt-get install testdisk later, I pointed Testdisk at my ailing drive and.. with a little delay (and a few clicks / crunches from the drive) it gave me a directory listing.
I headed to the folder containing the recordings and instructed testdisk to dump the data to another disk in my machine.
It only went and did it! It's recovered about 60% of the data (30gb total recovered) which is quite an impressive amount considering the number of errors that drive was throwing out (Not to mention its crunching and clicking). I didn't take any steps to keep the drive cool; after the 4-5 hour recovery period it was up to about 40c.
Either way, for me in this circumstance, the freezer trick helped my drive to complete its spin up routine, and testdisk managed to get the data back.
...and I'm sat here amazed and bemused! Hope this helps someone else, or if nothing else makes you all run your backups
, it only dropped at extreme most 70cm