Hard drive failure, need recovery

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giyad

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Well this is the problem. I came back from a trip to new york and when I got back, the blue screen of death was waiting for me :knock: :dead: . It said that if you haven't tried restarting your computer to restart it. So I did. After that it would just say operating system not found. I was checking in the BIOS and the hard drive wasn't even being found. I tried reimaging it but that wasn't working because I still couldn't locate it.

So I sent my laptop back to Sony and they replaced the harddrive, but I asked for the original drive back so I could recover some files. There is my problem, do you think it is possible to recover files from a harddrive that won't show up? If there is a way, do you know where I can do this for less than $700 because all those sites I found are charging $700+. The hard drive is not physically connected right now and just sitting here.

The hard drive is for a laptop and its a Toshiba, if that helps

Any help appreciated! :angel:
THANKS
 
Locate a program called "ERD Comander 2005" by Winternals. Boot your computer from that cd and have your old hard drive conected. ERD Commander has several tools you may find useful. I'm not sure if it would still work if you can't find your HDD, though.
 
You can always try putting it into a linux machine and copying files over that way. I had some success with this when my parents HDD died, I was able to recover some files, but some were corrupted. It is worth a shot.

BTW
:wave:Welcome to TechSpot:wave:
 
I am trying to use a downloaded file called PCI file recovery(google it). It is free and seems to help with lost files from crashes, viruses, etc. U need to be able to hook ur old drive up along with your new drive. Might look into it as an alternative.
 
Here's a trick that works sometimes:

Freeze your laptop hard drive for a day or so. Heat induces failure in mechanical devices such as a hard drive, so the colder you can run it the better.

Then do the following:

Use a laptop to IDE hard drive adapter and hook up the hard drive to a desktop system. This will keep it cooler when it runs - maybe blow some air over it as it runs.

The less you mess around with it the better. There are two ways to get your data off.

  1. Boot into windows, and use Windows explorer to get your files
  2. Use a utility such as Norton Ghost to make a mirror image of your hard drive

If your filesystem is corrupted, and this is usually the case, the best option is using Ghost with the -IA switch, which bypasses the file system entirely. Once your data is safely on a good disk, then you can run chkdsk to fix the filesystem, and rescue your files. You may find some files un-recoverable - but the majority of your files should be intact.

WARNING! Failing hard drives get exponentially worse the more you use them. The methods described here are not perfect, and if you can't afford to lose any of the data on your disk, then your best option is to pay a professional to do it for you - and yes, it will be very expensive.

Good luck!
 
Heat Hard drive at 40-50C for a few hours

There are different causes for harddrive failure.

My harddrive seized during the summer. After some research I found that humidity might be a likely cause so I baked the harddrive at 40C for a few hours and was able to access the data for long enough to backup.

It might be worth a try
 
Crusader69 said:
what do you do when you have used GetDataBack but most or all of the JPG files are scrambled. Can you repair them? :knock:
not that I am aware of. Jpeg is a compressed file, although I use jpeg the safest for pics is to use uncompressed files such as .tiff.
 
purepc.com said:
Freeze your laptop hard drive for a day or so. Heat induces failure in mechanical devices such as a hard drive, so the colder you can run it the better.

Then do the following:

Use a laptop to IDE hard drive adapter and hook up the hard drive to a desktop system. This will keep it cooler when it runs - maybe blow some air over it as it runs.

The less you mess around with it the better. There are two ways to get your data off.

  1. Boot into windows, and use Windows explorer to get your files
  2. Use a utility such as Norton Ghost to make a mirror image of your hard drive

If your filesystem is corrupted, and this is usually the case, the best option is using Ghost with the -IA switch, which bypasses the file system entirely. Once your data is safely on a good disk, then you can run chkdsk to fix the filesystem, and rescue your files. You may find some files un-recoverable - but the majority of your files should be intact.

WARNING! Failing hard drives get exponentially worse the more you use them. The methods described here are not perfect, and if you can't afford to lose any of the data on your disk, then your best option is to pay a professional to do it for you - and yes, it will be very expensive.

Good luck!

What, exactly, do the "professionals" do to implement the recovery? Anyone know? I'm just curious. We got experts in this site, no?
 
Great Help !!! Thanks Guys!

These guys recovered my data for me for 55$. Their website is http://m7l.com/ . You should talk to them if you ever need data recovery cause all those other professional websites charge $700+.

:slurp:
 
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