crashed hard drive data recovery

[benyl]

Alright, I did a search to no avail.

A friend of mine has a Dell laptop. All his hard drive does is click when you try and boot it. We know the hard drive is bad as we swapped it out with another identical laptop. The hard drive does work in either PC. The good one works in both.

As usual, there is some critical information on the drive. Where is the best place to go and get the data extracted?

Thanks!

[sputnik]

http://www.computerpi.com
http://www.essentialrecovery.com/

$125+/hr (except to pay well over $500 for each harddrive)

Clicking is generally due to a dead servo motor on the arm. I would recommend that you stop "trying" to get it to work because you can potentially damage the platters and kill your data.

[Davetronz]

If you dont want to pay the big bucks you can try this.
Take out the drive and put it in an anti-static bag in the freezer for about 1/2 an hour. Take the drive out of the freezer and quickly install into the computer.
We used to do this at a shop I worked at when HDD's would fail. It works maybe 15% of the time.

[sputnik]

If the drive is clicking, the freezer will do NOTHING.

The only reason you would put the harddrive in the freezer is to quickly cool it when you have a failure because the circuit board/power module is overheating. This will just buy you sometime to drag down enough data before it permanently melts. This is most common in the old SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 drives.

The clicking noise is due to a damaged servo motor or stripped gears and basically the arm (with the heads on it) is balistically bouncing all over the place. Attempting to read this drive (frozen or not) can seriously compromise the data you are trying to recover.

[Kor]

Yup, there is no DIY way to fix this.

Its going to cost a LOT to get the data off of the drive if its a mechanical failure (as it seems to be).

Does he/she REALLY need whats on there?


This is where the term "backup" came from... if you have wireless, backing up your laptop these days is as easy as a batch file that throws files to your PC while you sleep at night.

[hampstor]

Benyl,

At work we use Kevin Ripa at computer evidence recovery in Calgary... but like everyone else said, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg. If the information is as critical, make sure you know exactly what needs to be extracted and not the entire drive. This way, you don't pay for useless data.