Re: I think my hardrive has died, seeking a second opinion
- From: "jeffrey" <johjeffrey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 4 Aug 2006 19:38:05 -0700
I once had a similar problem, except there was no warning sign. My
hard drive suddenly started grinding and stopped working. I called
Drive Savers, but they said it would cost $1000 to recover the data.
My data wasn't particularly important, so I left it alone.
I was able to get my hard drive to work about five minutes each time I
froze it in the freezer. I bought a new hard drive, booted into DOS,
and copied files over from my broken hard drive. Then, I froze my HD
again and copied over some more data. And I did this until I had
enough of my important stuff backed up. With the frozen hard drive,
the transfer rate was slow and some files were corrupted, but I was
still able to get my most critical files.
What brand is your hard drive? Mine was a Quantum, and I've heard that
Quantums are very problematic. My uncle had a Quantum drive that
literally melted in his computer (he could smell plastic burning and
saw black burn marks).
Malke wrote:
Amazing Jim wrote:
Answers inline, with snippage:
About 6 months ago my PC started making an odd noise, which I decided was
the fan, but it turns out it was most likely the hardrive bearings
grinding, oops, mistake number 1.
Your hard drive has died. Nothing you do from any software position -
Windows 98, Windows XP, whatever - is going to work. It's dead. You should
have pulled your data immediately the very first time you heard the noise.
Because the original HDD is ATA and the new one is SATA I also got a host
PCI card, but as I can't get the system to boot I have no way of
installing the drivers for the card, and therefore can't install the
drive. (Muppet, I didn't think of that)
If you want a SATA drive, you'll need a floppy drive so you can put a floppy
in with the SATA drivers during the XP install (F6). If your machine
doesn't have a floppy drive, either buy an internal one or an external usb
drive. Make sure your BIOS will allow you to see usb devices before an
operating system is loaded. Since your machine is only 3 years old, it
probably can.
Otherwise, take the SATA drive and the controller card back to where you got
them and buy a new IDE drive. Install Windows per usual.
So, the big question firstly is, have I pushed the old drive bearings too
far and the unit is useless? Is there any way to recover it's data?
The drive is dead. If you want the data, you'll need to send the drive to a
professional data recovery company. You've messed with it so long that even
they may have a hard time recovering the data, but if it's crucial then
it's worth a try. I prefer Drive Savers, but there are other companies such
as Ontrack and Seagate. Those companies' services usually start at around
$500USD and go up from there. Only you can determine the value of your
data.
DriveSavers - http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services - https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/
http://www.ontrack.com
Malke
--
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic"
.
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