Old HDD failure - advice.

Columbo

Columbo

Columbo

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So my pensioner neighbour knocked on my door last night to ask if I could look at his computer as he couldn't access his files.
After some investigation I managed to work out that one of his hard drives is faulty so I took it out and placed it into a docking station I have, my computer briefly sees the drive, locks up for a bit then nothing.

Its a 2TB Toshiba drive made in Feb 2014.

Its also making all the usual clicking noises an old mech hard makes when they fail which I presume is the head.
Regardless on this drive are a load of his old photo's and videos of his family, some of which are no longer here and of course they are not backed up anywhere and these are what he's most concerned about.

So is there a chance I can rescue the files for him somehow?
Any advise appreciated.
 
Sounds like a professional job - anything you can do at home at this point is usually a "Hail Mary" kind of thing unless you have experience transplanting drive parts as required.
 
Rroff said:
Sounds like a professional job - anything you can do at home at this point is usually a "Hail Mary" kind of thing unless you have experience transplanting drive parts as required.
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Nah I have none of the experience and wouldn't be confident enough to even think about messing with it beyond the basic stuff I've already done.

Any recommendations come to mind or should I just do the usual search around?
 
If it's a mechanical issue I wouldn't try anything - really needs a professional data recovery company who can transfer internal hardware components in a safe environment to try and get data off. The best places have specialist tools to read data of platters directly etc and recreate the data.

If it was an electronic or power issue there is a chance you could swap the board off a same model drive to get it working but even then it doesn't always work.

My advice - if it's important data and there's no backup then a data recovery company (whilst expensive) would be the best option in my opinion. Even then data recovery isn't guaranteed. Google search for a reputable company and cross your fingers that there isn't too much internal damage.
 
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fizzy said:
If it was an electronic or power issue there is a chance you could swap the board off a same model drive to get it working but even then it doesn't always work.
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Only do this if - and only if - it is the EXACT same model. Not just the same capacity, not just the same product line. You need the part nos to be identical.

One thing you can do is look for corrosion on the board and if you see it clean it with IPA.
 
Is the head constantly moving when it's powered on, but you're not accessing it? If not, one trick that I got very lucky with is to stick the drive in a sealed bag and put it in the freezer for a few hours. A few hours later, plug it in to the PC without letting it come to room temperature. If you can access and transfer the files, then do that immediately.
 
darael said:
Is the head constantly moving when it's powered on, but you're not accessing it? If not, one trick that I got very lucky with is to stick the drive in a sealed bag and put it in the freezer for a few hours. A few hours later, plug it in to the PC without letting it come to room temperature. If you can access and transfer the files, then do that immediately.
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One of the "Hail Mary" things though - it often works but you tend to get a narrow window to recover files and if it doesn't work potentially destroys the drive beyond any kind of economical recovery, or completely unrecoverable or makes the job a lot harder for a professional.
 
Rroff said:
One of the "Hail Mary" things though - it often works but you tend to get a narrow window to recover files and if it doesn't work potentially destroys the drive beyond any kind of economical recovery, or completely unrecoverable or makes the job a lot harder for a professional.
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Yeah, that's right enough. I think I used it on a smaller hard drive of around 250 GB, but it bought me half an hour, which was enough time for me as the drive was about 75% full.
 
HDDs have adaptive data that's written at the time of manufacture that's unique to each drive so swapping circuits boards may not work either or cause more data damage.
 
do NOT plug it in anymore if it's making horrible noises.. An old friend of mine had an external HDD making lots of noises, and not working.. however she kept plugging it in hoping it would "just start working" by the time I got involved and sent it to a data recovery company there was little they could do as the heads had been literally scoring the platters.. she lost irreplaceable photos and videos...
 
So, one trick I’ve learnt is freezing the drive can give you about 30 mins of up time in a lot failure scenarios. Pop the drive in a plastic freezer bag with the SATA data and power cables poking out and seal as best you can. Then stuff the lot inside another bag and seal and leave in freezer overnight. Only open the first bag to make the connections.

9 times out of 10 it works long enough to pull data over to a new drive.
 
Years ago I had a small secondary drive probably 80GB or so fail, there wasn't anything of importance on it but I had another drive that appeared identical sat on a shelf so as an experiment I swapped the boards over and after all that the PC still wouldn't detect the drive...

A lot more recently I swapped a PC over for someone and migrated their data from the old one which was in a SFF desktop case. Moved the old PC out the way and put it where they wanted it but standing on its side instead of flat and it wouldn't boot with the click of death on power on.

When I put the SFF case flat like it had been in the old office it booted fine, as far as I know its still working with a note pinned to the case saying the drive is failing so don't stand it up.


Data recovery is a dark art so if its important to him you need to look at a specialist company only if he says he's not willing to spend money on it is it worth trying the freezer trick others have suggested and try powering the drive in different orientations.
 
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