Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Christopher Tolmie
- If the drive is not spinning up on power-on, I'll lightly rap on the side of the drive enclosure with the handle of a screwdriver while listening for the platters to begin to spool-up.
- If it doesn't spin up, I'll increase the pressure of each rap until it does start spinning. I've gone to the extreme of picking up an externally mounted full height 5.25" disk drive and slamming it continuously on the desk while it was starting up.
- I did this for over six months until the drive finally died completely, but I did extend its life and it never had corrupt data on it. Of course, it was all backed up. If the drive won't spin, then you aren't going to recover the data.
- You can you a third-party utility like RESCUE that reads the drive directly using its own operating system and saving individual files and directories to another drive. I've recovered entire drives this wayI it is time consuming but it works. When all else fails, send it to the professionals.
- Search the Web to find different companies that specialize in rebuilding the drive, but expect to spend mucho dinero.
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Lyle Giese
Put CMOS back to auto for HD and see if it sees an HD at all. Put in a bootable floppy can you see the HD? (Don't forget to write protect the floppy in case this was a virus.) Now try EZ-Drive. Some versions (I have several on hand with different advanced options) show what parameters the hard drive is set to in CMOS and what parameters the drive was formatted with. The second set is important. Sometimes the BIOS doesn't auto correctly.
Listen to the HD. If it powers up normally by sound (no strong thumping sound) and the platters seem to spin up, you still have a chance. If the drive spins up and then down or if it emits a strong thumping sound, the hard drive is toast and only a professional recovery company with a clean room can help.
If the HD doesn't spin up at all, occasionally you can gently slam it down to get stuck platters unstuck and it will spin up long enough to back up your data. The HD is toast physically at this point, and it needs to be replaced before trying the slam technique. There were also a few older HDs that had the flywheel exposed, and you could nudge it slightly and they would spin up long enough to back up the data. Again these are last resort techniques and you ARE planning on replacing the HD anyway.
From here, one of several software products are available to assist you as long as the drive spins up physically to assist the technician. Most of these products can read drives with damaged FAT tables or missing sectors.
And it could be just a simple matter of losing the Active attribute for the partition! Also, viruses can cause this by blasting the partition table, and some of the professional revival products can assist from here. Good luck!
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Craig Shipaila
Before you do the following, make sure that the controller is not the problem or a cable on backwards, etc., by taking the drive out of the computer and putting into another one to see if it's the computer causing the problem. If the other items have been checked, then do (what we call) the slam test.
If the drive is dead the only thing you can really do is:
1. Find out if the person needs any important info that you might be able to get off of computer. 1a. If person has data they cannot live without and the drive is not running, take the drive out of the computer and slam it down to the desktop to get the motor running. Nine out of 10 times, this will get the motor running long enough to get data. If needed you can also send the drive into a White Room to have them get the info.
