[mycotopian]

I am trying to help a stubborn buddy that didnt backup about 8 gigs of stuff on his hard drive. His PC wouldnt boot so I took it to my place and hooked it up as master on my secondary IDE. I booted up and got the dreaded CLANK CLANK CLANK. I tried all the jumper settings and I even tried the freezer trick but I just cant get it to detect. Any suggestions?

[ResponsiblAdult]

http://www.r-tt.com/

[Xaotic]

Unfortunately, it looks like software tools are not going to help you as this is a hardware issue. Most likely, the controller PCBA has failed. To recover data, you'd need an identical model drive of the same capacity and preferrably the same firmware revision. Once obtained, swap the PCBA(printed circuit board assembly) from the good drive to the failed drive, then attach and boot. Many times this will correct the problem and enable recovery. If the drive still will not cycle, then the problem is internal and usually data recovery is very expensive, if possible at all, and requires a clean room.

[qualhiveldorf]

If you have access to a clean room you can possibly try to purchase the same model and simply swap out the platters. Of course though, xaotic's idea is probably much easier.