Hard drive recovery - any help?

[david]

Well, my Fujistsu Hard Drive finally seems to have gone. I had my
computer on all night and in the morning, I heard the D: drive
clunking. So I shut it off and when I turned it on, I got a hard disk
failure. Boot disk time. The first time I went to DOS using a boot
disk, I could still access the drive - although it made a awful
clunking noise when I typed in DIR - but it gave me the directory
(leading me to believe it is just a problem with the boot sector but I
could be wrong). Anyways, I copied a few files off the drive onto my
C: drive. That worked so I figured that my drive was ok but just
acting up a little. I then rebooted and went to see if it was working
in Windows 98....but it didn't recognize it in windows. Alas, since
then, I have not been able to access the drive in DOS and I don't know
why.

What happened is this : it is my Master Slave. So my Quantum boots
fine, but I get a Slave Hard drive failure when I boot. So I use the
boot disk and it comes up with DOS - which is great, but now, it
doesn't seem to recognize the drive any more in DOS. I only get C:
and the CDROM - but not D: . I am hoping to get back to a situation
where I can see it again, if just to copy files to another drive.

Is there any help for me? Is there a program that will be able to
recover or at least access the drive?

Running Win98, 96 meg ram.

Thanks

 

[Daniel L. Belton]

Well, my Fujistsu Hard Drive finally seems to have gone. I had my
computer on all night and in the morning, I heard the D: drive
clunking. So I shut it off and when I turned it on, I got a hard disk
failure. Boot disk time. The first time I went to DOS using a boot
disk, I could still access the drive - although it made a awful
clunking noise when I typed in DIR - but it gave me the directory
(leading me to believe it is just a problem with the boot sector but I
could be wrong). Anyways, I copied a few files off the drive onto my
C: drive. That worked so I figured that my drive was ok but just
acting up a little. I then rebooted and went to see if it was working
in Windows 98....but it didn't recognize it in windows. Alas, since
then, I have not been able to access the drive in DOS and I don't know
why.

What happened is this : it is my Master Slave. So my Quantum boots
fine, but I get a Slave Hard drive failure when I boot. So I use the
boot disk and it comes up with DOS - which is great, but now, it
doesn't seem to recognize the drive any more in DOS. I only get C:
and the CDROM - but not D: . I am hoping to get back to a situation
where I can see it again, if just to copy files to another drive.

Is there any help for me? Is there a program that will be able to
recover or at least access the drive?

Running Win98, 96 meg ram.

Thanks

Sounds to me like your drive is completely dead now. The only way to get
the data off of it now is to send it to one of the data recovery services,
and the cost for this service is lots of dollars.

About the only thing you can do is to chunk that drive and get a new one.

The clunking you heard was the sound of the actuator arms in the drive
moving, and possibly hitting the platters themselves...

 

[Bob Shuman]

Sometimes you can try gently rapping the drive to get it to spin up again.
Also, you might be able to spin the disk manually to get it to start up.

Good luck.

Bob

 

[david]

Sometimes you can try gently rapping the drive to get it to spin up again.
Also, you might be able to spin the disk manually to get it to start up.

Good luck.

Bob

Thanks Bob, read my new post on what has happened!

 

[Ron]

Something similar happened to me with a Maxtor drive. Fortunately, I image
my primary drive with Ghost and record that image to CD's. Maxtor replaced
the failed drive (3 year warranty). I then loaded the image back onto the
new drive and was up and running in 15 minutes. I realize all this may not
help you now, but you may want to consider how to deal with future
meltdowns. In the meantime, here are a couple of links to check out if you
really need to recover the lost data:
http://www.hdodatarecovery.com/
http://www.cbltech.com/
I don't have any connection to either of these services. I just saw their
ads in a local computer magazine.
-Ron
San Diego, CA (Wildfire capital of the world)
(email: replace 'abuse' with 'cyberguy3k')

 

[Henry Mydlarz]

Once I had a customer with a badly clunking drive that was failing to boot
almost all the time. Having nothing to lose I ran Ghost trying to copy the
drive to another drive. It took over 40 minutes for the 6.4Gb drive, with a
lot of clunking and freezing, but in the end the new image was successful. I
was (and still am) impressed with Ghost.

Henry

 

[Alex Lee]

Well, my Fujistsu Hard Drive finally seems to have gone. I had my
computer on all night and in the morning, I heard the D: drive
clunking. So I shut it off and when I turned it on, I got a hard disk
failure. Boot disk time. The first time I went to DOS using a boot
disk, I could still access the drive - although it made a awful
clunking noise when I typed in DIR - but it gave me the directory
(leading me to believe it is just a problem with the boot sector but I
could be wrong). Anyways, I copied a few files off the drive onto my
C: drive. That worked so I figured that my drive was ok but just
acting up a little. I then rebooted and went to see if it was working
in Windows 98....but it didn't recognize it in windows. Alas, since
then, I have not been able to access the drive in DOS and I don't know
why.

What happened is this : it is my Master Slave. So my Quantum boots
fine, but I get a Slave Hard drive failure when I boot. So I use the
boot disk and it comes up with DOS - which is great, but now, it
doesn't seem to recognize the drive any more in DOS. I only get C:
and the CDROM - but not D: . I am hoping to get back to a situation
where I can see it again, if just to copy files to another drive.

Is there any help for me? Is there a program that will be able to
recover or at least access the drive?

Running Win98, 96 meg ram.

Thanks

OK, well in my experience with this sort of thing, you drive is likely
dead or dying. The only thing you can do now is to attempt some sort of
data recovery. If its worth it to you, you can consider a professional
data recovery service (but its expensive).

Another resource you can try is the following link:
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf

This document contains comments from people on how to recover data from
a hard disk. Just FYI, most of these tricks will only work once or
twice if you are lucky. And as strange as it may sound, the "freezing"
does indeed work.

Hope this helps,

GQ

 

[Bob Kos]

I have read both of your posts and can sympathize with your position. You
need to make a decision RIGHT NOW. Is the data you're trying to recover
irreplaceable or just a convenience? If your livelihood or more depends on
the data, you have no business screwing around with it. Buck up & get it
recovered.

If you're just trying to preserve files that have historic or archival value
that wont end your world if deleted, you're on the right track. If I were
in your spot, I would grab the drive out of it and carefully note the exact
model. Then I would then scour eBay till I came up with another in working
order. Take the electronics off the operating drive and set them onto your
old hard drive's chassis. This may well bring it back to life. Copy your
data IMMEDIATELY if it does. Then throw both the donor drive and the
'Frankenstein' drive in the trash so neither will be depended on again.

I received a giant box of mystery drives a while back. This gave me the
opportunity to experiment with a number of them this way. If you have the
identical drive, you CAN swap electronics. If it's not identical, no dice.

On that note, I still have a few operating Fujitsu drives from that box.
Get a model # and I might be able to help.

Good luck.
bkos at infionline dot net

 

[James Sweet]

I have read both of your posts and can sympathize with your position. You
need to make a decision RIGHT NOW. Is the data you're trying to recover
irreplaceable or just a convenience? If your livelihood or more depends on
the data, you have no business screwing around with it. Buck up & get it
recovered.

If you're just trying to preserve files that have historic or archival value
that wont end your world if deleted, you're on the right track. If I were
in your spot, I would grab the drive out of it and carefully note the exact
model. Then I would then scour eBay till I came up with another in working
order. Take the electronics off the operating drive and set them onto your
old hard drive's chassis. This may well bring it back to life. Copy your
data IMMEDIATELY if it does. Then throw both the donor drive and the
'Frankenstein' drive in the trash so neither will be depended on again.

I received a giant box of mystery drives a while back. This gave me the
opportunity to experiment with a number of them this way. If you have the
identical drive, you CAN swap electronics. If it's not identical, no dice.

On that note, I still have a few operating Fujitsu drives from that box.
Get a model # and I might be able to help.

Good luck.
bkos at infionline dot net

Sometimes you can do this, the newer the drive the less likely it'll work
though. In this case it sounds like an internal problem.

 

[Peace]

I know this is gonna sound Insane But I've had it work on a variety of
Hard Drives that have failed.
1, remove the hard drive from the unit it failed in
2, place the HD in a plastic zip lock bag with a piece of paper towel
3, Put the Drive in the freezer overnight.
4, next morning (or day) make sure you have a drive to recover the
data to and have the system prepped to RAPIDLY recover th data.
Ghost should work for this purpose.
5, reconnect the frozen Hard drive and Immediately start up the system
and go right to the data recovery(backup)