strange problem with hard drive

I have a laptop Hard drive (Hitachi 7200 rpm 80gb ATA/IDE from tigerdirect.ca) in a enclosure. I plugged it into my computer last night it was spinning up and accessing the drive, and then it took a thunderous crash on HARDWOOD flooring

I unplugged it immediately, and stopped in shock at the gravity of my situation. All my school work, games, movies, utilites.. gone.... The worst part was that I was contemplating backing up the stuff on it not 4 hours ago!

Anyway, I tried plugging it back in, and the drive spun up, with no grinding noises (so thankfully, no drive farming). When I tried to open My computer, the window would freeze and I would have to close it via task manager.

I pulled out my trusty PClinuxOS 2007 cd, and ran livecd. I plugged the drive in, and linux recognized it. However, I could not view its contents.

I did some Googling on what can be done to revive drives, and came across the idea of putting the afflicted drive in the freezer and then trying it after its frozen up. This worked for a bit... but after pulling about 500 megs, the copy window said the drive 'stalled'. I put it back in the freezer over night, and this morning pulled another 200 megs before the 'stalled' status came back.

Now, when I plug it in, I can see the drives and the directory structures, but all of my files are listed as 0kb in size.

Again, this drive spins up, the head moves, but it just dosen't want to work. And, it still only works in Linux. Sorry for the long post, but does anyone have ANY idea what could be affecting it? Is there anything I can do (i.e. tapping its side or something).

I know about third party services that take info off hard drives, they are obscenely expensive, and I cannot pay for one.

 

Well, it's pretty much toast. You probably knocked a bearing off or something inside the drive, and it can't deal with that. The only thing you can do is keep putting it in the freezer, and then trying to get as much off of it as you can. Start with the most important stuff first. School work, then the media. If that stops working, then you may need to take the screws off the drive, and see if you can see what is mechanically wrong with it, and if you can fix it (try to do it in a very clean place, with minimal airborne dust) Welcome to "Why Making Backups is a Good Idea: 101", and it's sister class, "Never Trust a Single Drive with Irreplaceable Data: 201"

 

NOOOOO!!!! damn damn damn!! Well... theres alot to be said for paper

Thanks for the info.

 

If the work is something that is very important, then the last, and very last optiuon you have of recovering, if everything else fails, would be to take the platters out, and tranfer them to another hard disk of the same make and model. If you are thinking of opening the drive, then make sure you do it a dust free environment, as even the smallest spec of dust can damage a hard disk beyond repair.

 

I don't know of anywhere that would be dust free around here.. about the most dust free conditions I could get would be to do this in the winter when it is very, very cold, and no wind... still, at least I now know it can be done.

I think what I am going to do is put it back in the freezer for a day or so. Its been plastic wrapped, then covered with paper towel, then covered with a grocery bag, so hopefully condensation will stay the hell away from it.

 

Taking apart a drive is a very, very bad idea....especially if you really want to lose your data. My suggestion would be take the HD out and install it in a external enclosure and see if you can read anything off of it instead of trying to boot through windows.

More than likely the actuator arm fell on one of the platters and trashed the platter.

 

You could try using recovery software such as this. I think you can see if data can be read using the trial version and only if this is successful do you pay for a version which will save your data.

John

 

ahh I don't want to pay for recovery software... it's important stuff, but not so important that I should pay for it.

I did try the trail though, and it showed me that all of my stuff was on it. So I guess I shouldn't give up hope then.

 

good luck to then