got a clicker. it'll be real inconvenient to work off a 7 month old backup i do have, but not $600 inconvenient. anyone use a local data recovery service around here?
This worked for me. made my bad hard drive a secondary and pulled all data off it to make a long story short.You will only have a 15-20 minute window. I say freeze it for 24 hours. http://www.lancelhoff.com/freeze-a-clicking-hard-drive-to-recover-data/
Interested in this as well... mine isn't clicking, just can't get any PC/laptop to recognize it... 50GB if music with no backup (yeah, I'm that dumb)... I don't care about the drive, I just want my music back....
you're not that dumb, i run 7 TB on my media center (no backup) and finally had a HD go bad (we think). There's a program, ask Nicad about it, we ran on mine and it allowed us to clone the harddrive onto a slave through bios so we didn't have to boot off of it. Mine was 320gig, transfered to 750gig...only my boot drive, so no media on it, but the transfer didn't take that long. Granted, we caught it AS SOON as we thought it was going bad...I also keep all the files I want backed up on multiple locations (work computer, burnt DVDs, external harddrive, main computer)
^^ Hopefully Nicad will chime in... How does it allow you to clone if it doesn't recognize the bad drive? (not the most PC savvy, to say the least). Also, its been borked for months, its just sitting there now. /not trying to threadjack btw.. will move this if need be.
Any formal data recovery will be expensive. Is this the drive you're booting off of, or is it a secondary drive? Can you read from it at all?
it doesn't usually. I'm not entirely convinced drew's drive was bad it gets to a point where you, as an end user, can't really do a whole lot in any event, you can just re-steal the music
I'd recommend the freezing method and have a standby drive ready. freeze, reconnect, and use cloning software to copy it over
I've used the freezing method in the past and I've had good luck with it. You could just take the computer outside and do it there lmao
If the cabling and jumpers are correct and this still happens, you are SoL for doing it on your own. I doubt many programs I know of will be able to do anything with it. A clicking drive is never a good sign. If one of our customers comes in with one and needs data, we send them to a local data recovery company. It is expensive and I don't think many actually go through with it.
what is ticking me off, is that professional data recovery seems to be alot of smoke and mirrors; nobody online commits to ANYTHING resembling an actual price until they have their hands on your drive. Thats bull. You know what your work is worth and you don't need the damn drive to tell someone what it costs to do work.
It really depends on the condition of the drive and the platters. They cant give you a quote without looking at how much work there is to do.
i'm not asking for a super specific, catch all. but go looking for any local outfit that will commit to anything regarding a cost for any of the services they do. If it were a car shop, and you knew you wanted a coolant hose replaced, would you feel too pleased if NONE of the shops would give you a quote on tat work until they got their hands on it and took it apart?
Not all drives are recoverable especially with head crashes. Cherry systems charges $300 non-refundable to determine if they can recover then it escalates from there depending on how soon it is needed. I can tell you first hand a 24hr service is over 4K. clean room, equipment to run the disk w/o its case, that shit ain't cheap. what you want to do is find the EXACT same drive and swap the logic board over 90% of the time we recover just fine and charge half of what Cherry does BUT when we can't it goes to Cherry. edit: not a believer in the "freezing". You will get the same result at room temp if it sits a few days.
The only time they waived the 300 that I know was for Katrina drives. I sent them all my Uncle's drives that housed his critical care patients but sitting in brackish water for over a week did it in.
for academic note, the drive is a WD green 500gb that was housed in a Cavalery USB2 enclosure, and is 3 years old. only about the first 20gig was filled...
Honestly, if it's something like music/movies/any kind of media that's not incredibly important to you, it's not worth it. 300$ just to see if the company can do anything with it? When my HDD crashed (Not a clicker, just instability with XP) I just took the loss. I lost a lot of data, but it's not worth over a grand just to recover stuff that I can get again, over the internets.
if i could just be -told- what it would be, i would be more apt to make that decision. I'm guessing logic board failure is more likely than hardware failure if I can't get a machine attached to it to boot. basically, from everything I can read, a professional will seek out a HDD from the same run as mine, and steal its logic board, then dump the data. If thats all it takes, then it shouldn't cost $300 for that work. if they have to crack open the drive and expose the platters, then thats alot more involved, and i understand that costs more depending on talent and facilities. but -i- can't seem to find any price commitments from data professionals on what these tasks generally cost. And thats just dumb. in terms of hard data, its only a few video files that aren't replaceable. but, this drive was a catalog that (because of my own weak backup policy) had 7 months worth of updates and sorting and indexing. that labor is worth something to me, enough to look into it.
Okay. It's too bad though about hard drive recovery companies not having set prices for doing their stuff. Fortunately, what I lost wasn't all too important. It was stuff that I should've backed up, but I can't do anything about it anymore. Seagate offers a recovery service, but generally, the cheapest "option" they have is 900$, which will take 2-4weeks, or 1400$, 2-5 days, with complimentary overnight shipping, and a free HDD with 2 year warranty... That really blows, man. No where else will even give a simple quote. Just a guarantee of no data, no charge. And if there is data to be recovered, they'll probably give your drive back with a butt raping 1k+ bill.
Man that sux to hear. My old company used On-Track(www.ontrackdatarecovery) to get data off the platters..but way too expensive. For some customers, it's worth the money, I guess.
if it's clicking there's a good chance of head-crash, rather than pc board problems. which means the more you try to turn it over, the more your platters are getting scored. it's happened to me before. 800$ clean room fee and non-recoverable drive... because we tried to start it up too many times. i've been running a nas with raid1 ever since. nothing stays on my local drive.
yeah, from here I'm no longer telling people to back up for protection or convenience. I'm telling them to backup because recovery has too much room for blatant fraud and is openly hostile to consumers. its not like you can really shop places for this for not only the price reason, but also, once you give them the drive, you're not getting it back in a condition to shop anyone else.
well that, and let's be honest. hard drives fail. redundancy is the cardinal rule of any data management plan.
I'd put it in a USB 2.0 enclosure and see if you can read it that way. They're cheap, microcenter etc. Double check your boot order in BIOS if it's preventing boot. If it's preventing POST, that's another story.
PS: Any data that is worth anything I keep on redundant drives (RAID 1 or RAID 5) on a single PC per location, AND keep a copy off site (SATA hotswap or USB 2.0 drive). Seems excessive, but it makes these situations very easy to deal with.
It can't be read in the enclosure? Plug it in after booting of course, not before. Last resort you could try another enclosure but it sounds like the drive is mechanically borked.
mechanical death likely. time to fire up the 7 month old backup and try to figure out whats lost... and make a money choice.
while I can appreciate co-located backups virtue, call me crazy about sending my stuff through my slow and crumby 256k upstream.