Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Clifford Liles
Depending on the drive failure I have had success with some rather extreme solutions to data recovery.
Symptom: Invalid Drive Specifications
Treatment: Basic Check your cmos battery Check your IDE cable and connections Check your jumper settings Remove all other IDE connections but the drive in question
Advanced Try disk manager software Try data recovery software Use a bios upgrade card ($39) and allow it to setup the drive Look up the drive specifications on the manufacturer's Web site and plug them in manually. Turn Off or On Write Precomp 32bit disk access
Symptom: Drive does not spin up: "Sticktion" Treatment: Basics Lightly tap the side of the drive case with a screwdriver no power Lightly tap the side of the drive case with a screwdriver power on
Advanced Cold soak the drive: Freeze in a zip-lock bag
Spray drive case with inverted can of canned air Lightly slap the drive on a desk top: (mild frustration) Repeated hammering of the drive on a desk top: (last resort total frustration only)
Symptom: Invalid media type Treatment: Basics Boot with a FAT32 Windows 95 boot disk Sys the drive
Advanced fdisk /mbr Check for a virus from a known clean boot disk
These are but a few techniques for the doomed platters. These techniques can be used in conjunction with one another to arrive at the desired solution. Lather, rinse, and repeat if necessary.
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Christopher Post
How do you bring a hard drive back to life?
My situation: Half of a volume set goes south on a WinNT server, no good backup and an angry boss screaming about the data being mission critical.
My solution: ** A bit unorthodox but, it has saved my butt! **
- Turn off the server.
- Take out the failing hard drive and wrap a static bag around it.
- Throw it in the freezer conveniently located in the break room.
- Pray for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
- Leaving the hard drive in the bag, quickly plug the drive back into the server. (Just plug the in cables and go.)
- Cross fingers, turn it on, and move all data off the drive as fast as you can! Then add a tape drive and start backing the dumb thing up!
My so-called logic: Metal contracts when it is cold.... so the platters shrink and increase the clearance for the read/write heads.
From: Chris Poole
Put the drive in the freezer for about a week and then you can usually get one last read off the drive.
