Recovering Data on a Failing Hard Drive [Hardware]

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From: Matt on 30 Mar 2008 19:14

Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.

The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.

Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
explain the situation in more detail:

Causes for Concern:
------------------------------

- I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
as a Master.

- When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
format the drive.

Causes for Optimism:
--------------------------------

- On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
the copying.

- The drive is always detected by the BIOS

- There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.

Going Forward
----------------------

A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
values I can't recall.

My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
From there I can see if paying ~£500 to recover a 40GB partition is
likely to be successful.

The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.

Kind Regards,

Matthew Boulton

From: philo on 30 Mar 2008 19:22

"Matt" <mattb95(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c377a5ad-4d29-4758-bf67-8068f3021cd1(a)s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.

The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.

Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
explain the situation in more detail:

Causes for Concern:
------------------------------

- I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
as a Master.

- When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
format the drive.

Causes for Optimism:
--------------------------------

- On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
the copying.

- The drive is always detected by the BIOS

- There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.

Going Forward
----------------------

A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
values I can't recall.

My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
From there I can see if paying ~�500 to recover a 40GB partition is
likely to be successful.

The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.

Kind Regards,

Matthew Boulton

I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather severe
read/write errors
but I could intermittantly copy data. I basically just kept trying...and
though I had to skip a few files that were unable to be copied...
I was able to recover about 98% of the data. I think it took about 6 hours
total.

The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.

DVD burners and DVD's are very inexpensive!

From: Matt on 30 Mar 2008 19:29

> I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather severe
> read/write errors
> but I could intermittantly copy data. I basically just kept trying...and
> though I had to skip a few files that were unable to be copied...
> I was able to recover about 98% of the data. I think it took about 6 hours
> total.
>
> The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.
>
> DVD burners and DVD's are very inexpensive!

Compared to the potential cost of having it repaired by a data
recovery company, I couldn't agree more now!

Kind Regards,

Matt

From: Calab on 30 Mar 2008 19:58

From: philo on 30 Mar 2008 20:00

"Matt" <mattb95(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:48b66f4f-2e89-4b55-b25c-4d03de33a287(a)c19g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> > I had a similar situation once. A drive had developed rather severe
> > read/write errors
> > but I could intermittantly copy data. I basically just kept trying...and
> > though I had to skip a few files that were unable to be copied...
> > I was able to recover about 98% of the data. I think it took about 6
hours
> > total.
> >
> > The person who's machine it was got a major lecture on backing up.
> >
> > DVD burners and DVD's are very inexpensive!
>
> Compared to the potential cost of having it repaired by a data
> recovery company, I couldn't agree more now!
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Matt

Good luck and just keep trying.
In my case, I found that after the drive ran for a few hours it started
working better...
but your results may vary of course.

If it does not allow data to be read when it's warm...
let it sit overnight and try it again when it's cool.

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