need help recovering data from a nearly/already dead drive

Okay, so BOTH of my 160GB WD Caviar SE drives decided to die on me a couple days ago. I have done nothing at all to cause any problems with them. Strange they BOTH died at the same time. Standard clicking.

Eventually, my computer stopped booting into Windows. I'm not too bummed about getting new drives (I would rather WD would honor the warranty, but I don't have an receipts as I bought the drives from OCF... albeit in factory sealed boxes). I just need to get my data off the drive.

Knoppix Live-CD detects the drives and sees all of my data... however I can't copy it over to a removable drive (my MP3 player, for instance)... i don't know why but it just didn't work.

They are in a RAID 0 Array... would it be possible for me to move the array to another computer? I could plug both drives into my neighbor's computer no problem... the problem is, will I be able to maintain that array on another computer? The BIOS would detect the drives no problem, but it would most likely leave them in IDE mode.

Windows won't boot, and windows setup (recovery console and just plain old setup) will not detect the drives. It doesn't ask me to login to a specific windows installation in the recovery console, just brings me to a C:\ prompt.

A bit of background:
I bought the drives October of 2006. They were factory sealed in the retail WD boxes. I bought the drives for $120 shipped. The warranty from WD is one year from purchase date. I checked the drive warranties on WD's website, and it said they were out of warranty on April 4th. They will extend warranties if I can prove the purchase date... however, I got the drives not from a retailer . I e-mailed them asking if I could screenshot the FS thread as a proof of purchase (longshot). I also PMed the seller hoping he might still have a receipt of the drive's purchase. If so, hopefully the drives were purchased less than a year ago.

Anyway, any possible way for me to get my stuff off the drives?

Not looking good my man. Raid 0 is very picky about change overs. To the point of me backing up my system if i were to even change over to an identical computer. However trying to make them work on a completely different computer will mostly likely be fruitless. If it has the exact same raid controller then you might have a slim chance. This is why people warn against putting anything you would remotely want on a raid 0 setup.

I would try a different live cd of a different distro and see if you can get the information off your drives. If it still doesn't work you might be out of luck. The drive might send signals that is there but the seeking and reading might not work (at least I believe those are seperate functions, recognizing and reading).

Of course there are alternative ways to get it off your drives but the ways are insanely expensive.

Good luck. Always sucks to lose info. I had this problem once when i switched over to a new setup. I basically just copied hdd's but then my documents disappeared with all my pictures in it. With Rstudio I was able to get everything back though.

I currently have a ftp server setup to sync with my desktop's irreplacables. Of course they are in the same house so if it burned to the ground that would still suck. As long as it is as safe as keeping a photo on paper in a box I am ok with it.

I Did a hard drive RMA with no proof of purchase, nor any receipt, 3-5 months ago. and the drive was 2.5 years old. I believe WD gives out 3 years warranty, try doing it online.

my co-worker was able to getdataback off a raid array by doing a plain getdataback on one of the drives (since the other one was 100% fried). he got some of the data, and but it did have holes and such in it. Why not unplug the hard drives, get a new hard drive, install windows on it, then run r-studio?

Knoppix reads all of my data fine, but if I go to move stuff over, it gives me a little X over the cursor... What other distros should I check out?

When I try to boot into WinXP, the loading screen comes up, and after, PageDfrg also pops up. Says it's defragmented all the system files, then the computer locks up there. If I try Safe Mode, it locks up after all the drivers are loaded (the screen shows what drivers are loaded).

My neighbor's computer has an ICH7R SB, whereas mine is an ICH5R SB... both are intel.

What's R-Studio? One of those programs that recovers data that has been formatted over I'm assuming? All I need is to just get the data off the drives, it's all still there for me to see. It just doesn't boot into windows.

If I had a large external hard drive, I'd be fine, could just install windows onto an IDE HDD and be done with it.

edit: HOLY DAMN. I just checked my brother's external hard drive to find 60GB of my stuff... Sadly it's missing some of the stuff I want (lots of pictures and such, some videos and movies and my America's Army files which took forever to download). Not AS bummed as I was a bit ago, but still a bit aggravated.

Okay, a little quick bump and change of thread direction...

I wanna find out what could have possibly killed both drives at the same time. Too coincidental for them to die at the same time.

I'm guessing power issues... it's a bit shoddy to say the least in the way they are connected. I have a line going from my PSU, and on one molex I was powering both SATA Drives (4-pin male molex->2x SATA power) and my videocard. The drives worked for quite a while with that setup when I had my 9800p. I'm guessing that switching to my x850pro might have drawn too much power and killed the drives? It's got a y-splitter on one molex. One end of that splitter goes to the vid card, the other to a male molex, which then chains two SATA power plugs (custom length) onto the drives.

If you hard drive is detected by your BIOS then data recovery software will help you in recovering your data. You can try Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software. It is a file and partition recovery utility which recovers the lost data from inaccessible hard drive. Download the demo to try: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
If the drives are not detected in BIOS then you have to look for data recovery services. Where drive is opened in class 100 clean room to extract the data.

SolidxSnake said:

I'm guessing power issues... it's a bit shoddy to say the least in the way they are connected. I have a line going from my PSU, and on one molex I was powering both SATA Drives (4-pin male molex->2x SATA power) and my videocard.

Click to expand...

If you discover both drives have problems, then most likely it is/was power related.