Thread: Repairing a crashed hard drive!!??

Try Westan, they are in Mount Waverley and can do that sort of stuff for you.

I got onto a company in Melbourne who look at it for free, provide a precis of the data they can retrieve and then for upto $2000 retrieve it. I have sent the hard drive to them, after talking to the bloke over the phone, he said thay do give some leeway to 'home users' so I may be able to pin them down a bit. But they sort of have us over a barrel, because of the 15 years of photos on the hard drive!! Did I forget to mention about making sure you back up all your data?

I have a program I use called Spinrite which is good for deep level drive recovery. It does not use windows - it fires up the computer in a low-level operating system bypassing a lot of windows type problems. It then scans each sector of the drive over and over until it gets a consistent (statistically speaking) value for that sector before moving on.

Not sure how it would work if your drive head has physically crashed, but as it is not windows it might be able to get enough info off the drive.

It doesn't cost a huge amount - you can get it from www.grc.com

Yeh, its actually a physical crash, so there is no software solution for it at the moment. The cylinder needs to be removed from the hard drive and read externally, possibly in a sealed room.

Had one go like that - took it apart to see what had died, and one of the drive heads had physically ripped off the read-arm and gouged the surface of the drive. I took apart the spindle, and one disk from that drive now sits in my workshop as a beercan coaster, another at work.

Reminds me to back up occasionally

15 years of photos without backing up :eek: , tell me you are joking.


HJ0

No joke!!!

And Im pretty sure Ive preached here about the importance of backing up.

I think I have the first 10 years on another hard drive somewhere, before I transferred it all to the lappie, but Im not sure.

Originally Posted by namtrak

HELP!

The hard drive in our laptop crashed. The drives makes a horrible clicking sound, the needle is screwed or some such thing. I am trying to find some data recovery specialists, not software driven, but can actually pull apart the hard drive and retrieve the data physically.

Any no of anyone out there?

Cheers

Australian Federal Police a dab hand at that sort of thing.

Best of luck with getting the data off that hard drive.

Originally Posted by namtrak

The hard drive in our laptop crashed. The drives makes a horrible clicking sound, the needle is screwed or some such thing. I am trying to find some data recovery specialists, not software driven, but can actually pull apart the hard drive and retrieve the data physically.

No, but good luck with your search!

One thing... the "ticking noise" is probably because either the platter has delaminated or, as someone mentioned, a head has come adrift and gouged the platter. Either way is not good news, most laptop HDDs only use a couple of platters (to reduce size) so there's a high chance that most of the data is physically beyond recovery...

The ticking is the drive homing & seeking trying to find the first track to complete it's POST (Power On Self Test)

It's buggered, you should have made the back up 'cos now it is going to cost BIG $$$$$$$

Yeah, you're right. At 7200 RPM head-strikes don't exactly 'tick'... Second time I've regretted the red with the chicken tonight.

Once upon a time I worked in a clean room (to look at me now you wouldn't think so though) and spent a lot of time modifying and repairing drives (it was worth it in those days), recovering some data is quite possible depending on were on the physical disk the crash occurred, some areas would render the whole thing useless.

Whilst $2000 might seem excessive the cost of running a true clean room and the training that goes into recruiting staff would justify it. Also people generally just chuck drives these days, so there is a limited market (supply & demand).

Generally speaking If your drive is over 5 years old (and any drive if your smart) you would be mad to not run very regular backups and if it is that old consider replacing it (I have much older drives that run fine mind you).

Some people run a RAID array that will in one mode automatically make a duplicate of your drive on to another drive in real time, but thats going to be tricky in a laptop.

I was also (quite recently) involved in an insurance claim were a big organisation had on the advice of "an expert" used a RAID array as their only backup, no need to elaborate on what happened there, but it wasn't pretty or recoverable.

Cheers


Dave

Originally Posted by kiwigeo

Australian Federal Police a dab hand at that sort of thing.

Best of luck with getting the data off that hard drive.

Yeah - tell 'em its full of

Interesting insight Dave thanks!

In future for backup, can I suggest the Maxtor OneTouch - great bit of kit, and with storage between 200GB and 1TB there's a drive for everyone! (I use a 250GB for work, a 200GB for music, and a 300GB for my photographs, and each is backed up to separate drives) The beauty of 1 touch for encouraging good backup habits. Now I wish I worked for them and got commission!