Data Recovery?

I am pretty much certain that overclocking fried a PCI HDD controller of mine...

The problem is that I think there may have been an overvolting issue here, and I fear it may have damaged my two 320gb hard drives and a 160gb hard drive on there as well.

The data is not critical, but I would like to have it back... and given that I don't think a head crash is involved... it seems to me that sending them out to a data recovery place may be a viable idea.

Background on my own trouble shooting:

Drives on hard drive controller card stoped working... had some errors with the card's bois at start up.

When I got around to switching the two 320gb drives over to my motherboard's IDE channel, I got nothing from the drives. No bios recognition, nothing in computer management and certainly nothing in windows explorer.



The question: Is this a good case to attempt data recovery? And if so, where should I go... and how should I go about doing it?

Well firstly I hope you have not attempted to write anything to these drives!

Please please do not put them in the freezer like some strange people...

One of the best recovery programs is R-Studio.

If the data is important then send it to a recovery company - you might get things messed up if you try it yourself...

If you cannot detect the drives in the BIOS I think you do not have a choice other than to send it to a recovery company.

Programmes like R-studio are good for retrieving data from a formatted drive etc. not much more than that

This death of yours sounds more like a power surge than an overclocking related failure.

r-tools / r-studio data recovery, i agree, saved my arse, those overpriced software suits are crap!

Please please do not put them in the freezer like some strange people...

Click to expand...

they arent strange, the freezer can work for drives that are over heating from friction, but it is a one time shot and you dont have long.

Mr.Guvernment said:

they arent strange, the freezer can work for drives that are over heating from friction, but it is a one time shot and you dont have long.

Click to expand...

How is that supposed to work? What is the theory behind that?

Cold shrinks metal. In any case, that does not apply here since they're not making grinding noises.

Even for something as simple as a bad logic board, the recovery companies still charge alot. Starting at 400 for example.

aaa said:

Cold shrinks metal. In any case, that does not apply here since they're not making grinding noises.

Even for something as simple as a bad logic board, the recovery companies still charge alot. Starting at 400 for example.

Click to expand...

But I don't think he has much of a choice!

I thought the data recovery places might have been cheaper... like $50 or something per drive... considering im in no rush to get the data back like most businesses would be.

Anyone know any data recovery companies that might make things go faster than a standard google search?

most data recovery compaines that can do anything literally take your drive apart, put them into new drives with compatible parts and such like that which means expensive tools, clean rooms.

Any data recovery company that seems cheap or like $50, all they are doing is what you could do yourself with some software.

i had to get a laptop harddrive recovered for an employee at my company
ontrack was able to save about 45% of the data for a mere $2075, but hey we got a free 80gb USB harddrive out of the deal
now when i have people tell me they have important data on their laptops, i tell them about the $2100 harddrive...they immediately request a USB harddrive

If the board is fried, there is a way to get your data off it with out paying a data recovery company.

Assuming your drives aren't very old and your a little lucky, you can probably find a hard drive with the same firmware on the board (check the label). All you have to do is remove the board from the new hard drive (I believe the screws are Torx 7), remove the board from the old drive and then swap the boards. Thanks to printed circuits there are no wires to connect or anything.

Granted, this will still cost you a bit, but much less then any company and you can speed up the process a lot too.

Hrmm, I've been meaning to write a guide on this for a while, had far too many boards fry on me in the past =\.

And making my own clean room / box... Damn.
Gonna miss my 800gb of dead storage...

The interesting thing though is that raiding wouldnt have helped in this case because the thing that caused the drive failures was the card, and so killed all three drives at once.

You don't need a clean room to change the logic board . . .

1. Find 1 320GB hard drive (assuming your 320GB hard drives have the same firmware) and 1 160GB hard drive with the same firmware as your drives.
2. Pick up a set of torx bits (I found the needed bit in a 30 piece screwdriver kit at Sears for $10)
3. Find the correct sized bit for the hard drive and remove the old logic board. Mark it so you don't mix it up with the working logic board.
4. Remove the board from the working 320GB drive.
5. Boot up the drive and move all the data to another hard drive.
6. Remove the logic board and switch it to the other broken hard drive and repeat step 5
7. Do the same with the 160GB hard drive.
8. Finished

If your store allows it, you can even return the logic boards to the newly bought hard drives and return them to the store you bought them from, assuming you didn't void the warranty (although I think you do) and the store will allow it (I am NOT condoning breaking store policy).

Not counting for transferring data, it should take you all of 10 minutes per drive and its very simple.