My desktop's hard drive has failed; how should I extract data back?

I've got 11 gigs of very important files that needed to be backed up; the drive is physically all right. Guys, help me out. What should I do? What options do I have?

What kind of cable/hardware would I need to extract the data out?

Any help is deeply appreciated!

-Bharat

asked Jul 03 '12 at 08:23

bharatkumargupta
646●41●46●53

edited Jul 05 '12 at 18:10

Fogarty ♦♦
11.7k●12●27●38

This is a great example why you back up your data. My Macbook Pro's hard drive gave out on me a few weeks ago so I replaced it and put my backed up data on my new hard drive.

(Jul 05 '12 at 18:37) ClaassenTech

3 Answers:

oldest newest most voted

If the drive is dead you need to take it to a place to recover the data.

This is not a buy a cable to fix job at all.

answered Jul 03 '12 at 08:39

Jackster1337
8.5k●178●214●300

thank you for the response, i understand the case but i m not willing to take my hard drive for repair as i live in India and dude trust me there is no trust worthy services offered here that can solve my problem, i had a hard drive failure earlier and the guy filled all my backed up files with viruses and missing links and the recovered data was of no use when i retrieved it, instead i had to pay him like 1500 Rs for that. Anyways thanks for the help i ll see what i can do, i was to back my files but its my mistake(carelessness), all my work files lost!

(Jul 04 '12 at 00:45) bharatkumargupta

can you describe how dead the drive is, in many cases the hard drive will still spin up and very low level data recovery tools such as spinrite can recover the data.

other times the drive will spin up but never initialize, and in that case, you can buy another of the same drive and swap the circuitboard and get the drive working again (for reads only)

if the motor or the actuator is dead then the only option is to take it to a data recovery place if the data is very important.

-=-===-=-=- If you cant and the data is not so important that you cant do without it, then you can try a little bit of DIY physical data recovery.

To do this, you need 2 of the same drives and you will have to find a room that you can seal off. then get a good filter (ones designed for central cooling systems), then tape it to the back of a box fan then run it for a few hours, then when working on the drive, do not wear any clothing that gives off any dust when you shake it (also make sure that they are short sleeve)

After all of that, you can work on swapping the platters to a working drive.

This has a low success rate and depending on how dust free the environment is you may or may not be able to recover all data before the read head gets completely destroyed. The hard drive case has a built in air filter that will handle some of the dust as the drive spins up, but overall, it will not be enough and without a very high end clean room, you will never be able to do a platter swap that will last more than a few minutes before killing the drive)

answered Jul 04 '12 at 08:18

Razor512
15.6k●34●80●242

that is really helpful, and i saw a similar video on youtube, but realistically its hard for me, the problem with the drive is it shows "bootmgr failed" as status, i tried booting with linux os cd, also with windows 7 cd but nothing working, at one time my system booted in safe mode but automatically shut off after 3 minutes, there is some 11 gigs of work files, again i keep the notes u listed here along with notes on web results and lets see what i can do, thanks again!

(Jul 04 '12 at 22:20) bharatkumargupta

so let me get this straight here, you are had a drive in the past that failed and you blame the guy you hired to copy the date because your drive had viruses on it and after the data was copied they were still there ??? I would say the guy did his job not there fault the drive had viruses it difficult if not impossible to get rid of many viruses when a drive is working no matter what virus program you use the best some can do for many viruses is tame them not rid a drive of them ...

most companies today that search for Trojans and malware and such don't use the word clean but the word is immunize being immune to something don't make you free of the problem it makes you a carrier, your drive is living with it at peace you still infect others ..

answered Jul 04 '12 at 09:53

jadtechnic
2.0k●5●18

i m not blaming the person, instead all i care about was my CAD, GD and 3D design work files, trust me when i received the files heavy chunk of the data was either missing or corrupt by viruses, now again i would say its my responsibility to back up my stuff, but i hired a professional at a price so the least i expected was fair returns, almost 75% of the data was useless and i faced loss, the kind of work i do and the software i use really stresses hard drive, it shows, and i use fairly low cost hardware(at current what i can afford) so there are many factors responsible again i hope u don't misunderstand the case i m addressing here.

(Jul 04 '12 at 22:17) bharatkumargupta

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