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So this morning one of my hard drives failed. It's nothing extremely critical worth paying thousands to repair, but I would really like to get the 179GB of files off of it. Whenever it begins to spin up it clicks a few times and is not seen by the system (when put into an external casing). When mounted in the system itself the machine will not boot up. I am thinking that's due to my bios being set to check the hard drives before booting.
Does anybody have do it yourself suggestions I could try?
Posts: 1572 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Put it in a moisture-free bag, then put it in the freezer for a few hours. You'll want to transfer things off it as quickly as possible while/if it works after that, so I suggest making sure your computer is cool, too (have it off for a while, and do this while the side is still open), getting a drive of identical size, and using dd (a *nix utility for copying the low level bytes off the drive, which is very fast).
You should use a disk of identical size because it will also copy the partition table, meaning extra space will be unusable. You can use a bigger disk just fine if it'll only be a temporary home for the data, just reformat after you have what you want.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Either you had a disk crash that resulted in physical damage, or else (I think more likely) it sounds like your FAT file got blown. FAT means File Allocation Table. This is the master index that tells the computer where all the data files are located on the disk. The Scandisk utility cannot fix corruption in this file. I had Scandisk blow out and report a problem in the FAT file, and thereafter the computer would just click and click and click when trying to reboot. Even when I rebooted in DOS mode, when I did a DIR command, it would list a few files, and then again I would get the click, click, click.
It was an 8-year old Pentium (I) computer. I gave up and bought a new one. Moved up to the wonderful world of Windows Vista. I did have some of my key doc files saved onto floppy disk. But I had to have a floppy disk drive specially installed in my new computer so I could use them. Seems computers no longer come with floppy disk drives standard.
There is software that will copy a hard disk byte by byte. This is how the FBI recovers files that supposedly have been deleted from a perp's computer. Deleting files only adds a flag that the file has been deleted. But the file is actually still there, unless it has been overwritten by a new file, or erased by reformatting the disk.
The data is probably all or nearly all recoverable. The question is, how hard do you want to work?
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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fugu13, why does the freezing work? I've known people to do it successfully, but I've never known why.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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Freezing and thawing will cause the components of the drive to shrink and expand, which could cause physical problems, such as binding of bearings/bushings to correct, at least temporarily. That's my guess, anyway.
Posts: 3275 | Registered: May 2007
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: Freezing and thawing will cause the components of the drive to shrink and expand, which could cause physical problems, such as binding of bearings/bushings to correct, at least temporarily. That's my guess, anyway.
Google seems to agree. I'll definitely have to keep this in mind.
Posts: 1945 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Ron: the mention of clicking suggests it is almost certainly a physical problem. I suspect this drive has been clicking abnormally for a while, such that it got written off as usual behavior. Clicking (not just spinning noises, but click sounds) is almost always a sign of impending failure.
As for why it works, yes, something along those lines. I don't think anyone has done an extensive investigation, but there are a number of parts in a hard drive that could be fixed by freezing in certain failure modes.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Ron: the mention of clicking suggests it is almost certainly a physical problem. I suspect this drive has been clicking abnormally for a while, such that it got written off as usual behavior. Clicking (not just spinning noises, but click sounds) is almost always a sign of impending failure.
As for why it works, yes, something along those lines. I don't think anyone has done an extensive investigation, but there are a number of parts in a hard drive that could be fixed by freezing in certain failure modes.
Have you actually seen this work? Cause I've tried it a number of times and it never has.
Posts: 3003 | Registered: Oct 2004
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