Reviving a HDD?

[Borisw37]

A 4gig hdd on my old computer, apparently died. It worked fine earlier to day. But now, when i try to start it, it makes a loud clicking sound, sounds like the head is hitting something. What can i try to bring it back to life? or is it dead and nothing will help it?

 

[turd]

Hard to say with that. Bringing it back to life as in getting data?
Or has in it being just fine again? I usually work with dead and damaged drives and recovery is much easier then repair. You could just let it rest or just cycle it on and off a few times and yes it may just decide to work for you. You could go a head an see if you can access it in dos and have it low level format, which will really shake things up. I have seen um tapped, banged, shaken and frozen, but any impack, particularly while spinning usually can cause some particle damage. You can swap controller cards with an exact model, you can even open it uo and look around, but a clean room is best for this, but 50% of the time you may notice no differenve(damage) during reassembly being very particle aware in a non-clean environment. I guess the answer I would give is that its pretty much an unknown.

 

[darthdana]

Got a couple 10MB drives from an old xt i could lend you.

Whats the value of the data?
Your time?

 

[Borisw37]

The HDD was actualy installed on a pentium II machine that my dad was using to practice SQL server, VB net, etc... So there is not that much value in the data, just some of his time. I have it in the freezer now. And luckly for me i have another SAME EXACT drive that still runs, so if freezer dont work, i'll try swapping the cards.

 

[Borisw37]

Wholy ****, i dont believe it. The drive is working
took out of the freezer after 1.5hrs pluged it in and it works. Backing up data now

 

[TUK101]

Good deal, and good job on backing up the data that you want/need off of the drive right away. In my experience with failing hard drives, it is about a 50/50 shot at getting the drive workeable enough to retrieve data off of it again. Hard drives are just like any other mechanical device in that they just slowly take enough wear in the few moving parts that they just get sloppy over time and have a tendency to jamb up and sometimes tapping or freezing them does just enough to get them working again long enough to retrieve the data just like you are doing now.

 

[Borisw37]

i used norton ghost and made an exact copy of the bad hdd onto a same size hdd. The bad HDD had w2k installled on it. When i try to boot from the hdd containing the copy w2k starts loading and then i get teh BLUE SCREEN. Im assuming some data was damaged on the broken HDD. How can i fix the problem, without reinstalling the system.

 

[turd]

Well the way I see it right now you have a few options that all revolve around recovery.

You can copy that ghost image over then slave that imigaged drive up to a bootable drive and go in and look for what you can access and save.

You can slave up the bad drive and try the same, but you may not now be able to get access to it, refreezing may not work.
Or it may work now.

You can try to use some recovery software if you have any.

You can try the W2K boot into CD recovery consolel method and attempt to repair the files on the ghosted drive that are keeping it from booting.

Or you could try a repair install on the ghosted drive.