Why did you have to die? (hard drive recovery)

Raggaholic

Alright guys, I need some serious help here.

I had a 120GB drive die on me. One day everything was working fine. I turned the comp off and went to class. I came back, started up the comp, and got a message before windows loaded basically telling me that my HD was dead. I don't remember exactly what the message was, but it of course had CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart after it.

I went out and got a HD recovery program and let that run for a few days. After that (and even a few noises that made me think "great I'm only making things worse" later), I gave up. I now sit with a 120GB paperweight.

I'm a big boy and I know that hard drives die. The problem is I REALLY need some things off of this hard drive. Every picture I've taken with my digital camera over the past three years was on this comp (I just moved it onto this hd for temporary storage while I was waiting for a larger drive to arrive from Newegg). Not only that, there are some... um... questionable videos of me a couple of girls on there. Overall, I only need around 10GB or so worth of files off of the drive.

My question is what do I do now? I've looked at a few data recovery places online and I don't have the $250+$200 per hour to kick out to recover the drive, but I really would like to have this stuff back. Any suggestions?

Lodbrok

First thing I was going to suggest was booting with a linux live-cd, but I don't know how much that is going to accomplish if the recovery program came up with nothing. Can't hurt to try. Do you have any idea what is wrong with the disc? The most common error is probably that the electronics have died. If this is the case, it is possible to swap them out for the electronics from an identical drive. This is an easy job that only takes a screwdriver. If there is a mechanical error, there is always the old put-it-in-the freezer trick. This often revives a drive for a short period of time since the different materials shrink/expand differently, but you will only get one shot at it.

Raggaholic

I have no clue what's wrong with the drive. I even tried to slave it on another machine and it just managed to lock up that machine WHEN Windows was able to detect it.

Hewn

In the same spirit of this thread...

I'm sitting on one 160gb hard drive right now that I would simply die if I lost all this information. What's a cheap and efficient way to back up this information so I don't have to go through the process Raggaholic is doing?

Lodbrok

Ok, I would still try a live-cd then. It might at least give you some information if it is able to mount the drive. Do you know if the drive is spinning at all? If it is, the problem is probably with the control electronics. It is a bit hard trying to diagnose this with the little information you have given. Here are some links that might be useful:

http://www.help2go.com/Tutorials/Computer_Basics/How_to_recover_files_from_an_unbootable%10dead_computer.html

Scroll down a bit in this one for info about replacing the controller board:

http://www.dansdata.com/io026.htm