Busted up hard drive

[tchristi]

Ok, this is definitely a bit of a techie question.

I have a hard drive that came up with a bad sector about two weeks ago. It wouldn't boot or mount. So I bought a new hard drive installed up XP and put the old hard drive in a usb enclosure.

I plugged in the usb and i was not able to read the drive (though it was detected.) Drive manager says it is nice, active, and empty.

I've tried a few of the recovery utilities out there. iRecover stalled out trying to index the drive (but it did detect the partitions correctly). I am know trying recover it all pro it is picking up a bunch of read errors. Looks like I've got more than one bad sector.

Anyhoo, I'd like to recover some of the data off the drive if it is possible but i'm not going to sell my soul to have a pro do it so any suggestions as to what to try?

[dparm]

Jason can chime in here and correct me, but down in the DMRC we just bought a file recovery utility that works on bad media (floppy, CD, flash drive). It might work for hard drives too.

[jharriso]

Something to try, and I am serious: Stick it in an airtight bag in the freezer for a few hours. You may be able to ghost it onto another disc before it totally craps out on you.

[jonathaw]

Whoa, is there any science behind this? Pretty random suggestion, heh. That's awesome if it works though.

[abudhu]

Whoa, is there any science behind this? Pretty random suggestion, heh. That's awesome if it works though.

It DOES work. Like he said, if you cover it in an airtight bag and shove it in the Fridge and try it again later it sometimes works.

Its obviously doesn't work 100% of time, but it works. There have been many claims, and I am one of them. I did this once and it worked. How? I have no clue. At the time I did it for fun, since the drive was c* anyways. But then when it started working again I was amazed.

[dparm]

According to Jason, some hard drive failures are caused by the platters getting too hot and expanding very slightly. Freezing them makes them contract, and might give you 10-15 minutes of recovery time.

[ajj]

i've tried a 'one inch drop' and that seemed to have work on one of my drives. I am running a RAID 0 setup but one of the drives flaked out on me. I droped it one inch (approximatly) from the ground and it now works. As weird as it may sound, drives, hardware wise can get stuck from heat so a 'jolt' of movement might losen it up. good luck with that.

[jonathaw]

Works on hearts, too. The machines are catching up.

[kaufmann]

ouch. I've never done that. OTHO, I have frequently done the "wrist snap." When a drive has a stiction problem, I grab the drive such that I can rapidly spin the housing about 1/4 revoltion *around* the platter. The key here is to center the rotation on the platter's hub.

Often, the drive motor is not strong enough to unstick the platter from a head or from slightly sticky bearings, and just getting to move for a moment does the trick - which is why dropping could also do it, albeit with a higher possibility of bouncing the heads on the platters.


-ck

[powellm]

The utility in the DMRC should do the trick.