harddriverecoverybasics.com

Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: David A. Hunt

• First establish the correct drive characteristics (cylinders, sectors, kapazität usw.) from the drive or from internet if not printed on the casing.
• Check all cables and connections (Power, EIDE, or SCSI).
• Turn on the Power and correct the BIOS.
• Watch for failures such as controller failure during bios check.
• Listen for unpleasant noises (after head crash).
• If the PC won't boot from disk, use a boot disk in the floppy and establish if drive C is available.
• If not, try Fdisk and see if a drive is visible (if not, it's starting to look bad...).
• If visible and reachable, copy any important data to floppy disk (if possible) or another drive if available.
• Revive the boot block, and try booting from the drive again.
• If the drive wasn't visible, then remove the drive and try to revive it in another PC.
• Sometimes removing the drive and gently shaking it can help to revive it if the user hasn't been using his PC on a regular basis, especially in older PCs.

Anyway, this a problem one can spend hours with, it just depends on how important the data was. Only cowards work with a backup!!!!

Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Mauri Presser

• Check the CMOS setup for drive settings.
• If an auto detect drive option is there, use it.
• Save the settings and reboot.
• Listen to see if the drive is spinning by putting your ear close to the drive (hopefully the drive is not so loud that you do not need to get close to it to hear it).
• If it does not spin, shut down the computer.
• Check to make sure pin one of the cable is on pin one of the drive (you might have seen a steady drive activity LED lit up if it was backwards).
• If one was on one, then physically remove the drive and FIRMLY holding on to it, twist your wrist in an attempt to break the "sticktion" (bearings stuck) free.
• Hook the drive back up and power up to a boot floppy.
• If it spins up now, try FDISK or other third-party software to see if it recognizes the partition(s).
• If not, try Norton Disk Doctor or equivalent to try and recover the partition.
• If it does see the partition (or if you recovered it) try and read the files.
• If not, back to Norton Disk Doctor.
• If this does not work, it's time for Ontrack or other data recovery service (if the client will pay!). Good hunting!!