Rescue files from dead hdd?

vail3r · 13 Sep 2010 at 20:37

A friend has given me a laptop to fix. The hard drive died so I have replaced that but he wants me to try and save his photo's if possible.

Is there any magical way to try and get it working for a few mins?

subbass · 13 Sep 2010 at 20:47

There's the freezer trick that may work, where you stick the hard drive in the freezer in a anti static bag or something. Better google it as I've never tried it before so can't vouch for it either but I guess you have nothing to lose.

Toughnoodle · 14 Sep 2010 at 11:58

Depends how dead it is. If it's not being picked up in the BIOS then you're in trouble. If it is, you can run the manufacturers disk fitness tool to see if any of the hardware errors are recoverable before trying to access the files on it.

Venares · 14 Sep 2010 at 12:35

Depends if the drive is dead or just the controler.

If its the controler you "could" track down an identical drive and change out the controler boards.

If its the disk however, thats slightly more problomatic.
It all depends if its just a stuck head or somthing like that. In that case the freezer trick may work or just a short sharp whack agaist the corner of a desk.

If the head has properly crashed though then its likely to have pretty much destryed the disk.