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Topic Starter Topic: seagate hdd crash

Grunt
Grunt
Joined: 08 Dec 2009
Posts: 64
PostPosted: 03-26-2013 06:23 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Hi, my 250gb seeagate hdd crashed. running windows 7 pro. not recognized in bios most of the time. says files are raw data. tried hooking up via usb connector, slave, etc. no luck.

I'm out of options. thinking maybe if I formatted the drive back to ntfs, I could then try to recover formatted partition with software. but, I can't access to format

does anyone have any suggestions?




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i liek boobies
i liek boobies
Joined: 26 Nov 2000
Posts: 11930
PostPosted: 03-26-2013 07:05 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Are there any clicking sounds when booting up or when the system tries to recognize the drive? If so, could be the hardware is borked.

If you absolutely must recover data from it before junking the drive, you may need to freeze it. Put the drive in an air tight zip-lock bag, and leave it in your freezer for a few hours. The air tight bag is to prevent moisture from entering the drive, and is very important. Don't just put it in naked, or with just a regular bag.

While it's in the freezer, grab yourself a bootable linux ISO and burn it to an optical disk. Prepare a salvage location into which you'll copy the data you're trying to recover, could be USB or a network location. Make a cup of tea. Maybe familiarize yourself with the OS UI in case you're new to linux, or this particular distro.

After a couple hours, I guess, bring the drive out of the freezer and hope really hard that your zip-lock bag was a good one. Plug it in, and boot up into your linux ISO. Work fast, because you're now on a timer. You have until the drive warms up again to find anything you want to recover, and copy it to your salvage location. If you save everything you need in the first go, good job. Otherwise, you may need to freeze it again and try later.

If you don't need to recover data from it, just junk it. 250 GB means it's quite old now, and most likely out of warranty anyway.

But if BIOS isn't recognizing it, I'm not sure what else it could be aside from hardware failure.




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Theftbot
Theftbot
Joined: 07 Oct 2009
Posts: 483
PostPosted: 03-26-2013 10:42 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


If the drive works mechanically, you can get a replacement control board online-might work




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Grunt
Grunt
Joined: 08 Dec 2009
Posts: 64
PostPosted: 03-26-2013 11:40 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


do you know if that board's failure would cause the partitions to be recognized as raw? Yes, the drive is spinning




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I'm the dude!
I'm the dude!
Joined: 04 Feb 2002
Posts: 12498
PostPosted: 03-27-2013 07:53 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I don't think there's any way to tell, Windows recognizing it as a raw partition means that it can't read it at all or can't read the MBR and isn't able to mount it. As U4EA mentioned, give a bootable Linux ISO a try, the tools are more likely to mount the drive even if the MBR is corrupt.

You can give other tools like Recuva a try but I don't recall if the drive has to be mountable.

If what you have on the drive is really important, I suppose you could send it to a company like OnTrack who do data recovery. Service isn't cheap though, I think around $2000.



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i liek boobies
i liek boobies
Joined: 26 Nov 2000
Posts: 11930
PostPosted: 03-27-2013 07:01 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Or maybe call this guy:

Quote:
I thought I'd share one of my proudest moments as a bench tech. I suspect most of us who are interested in this type of work frequently encounter customers with lost data. Usually the issue is resolved with a simple undelete application, of which there are many. Sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and image the disk and attempt to recover readable files. No matter the method, it's the best feeling in the world to be able to call the customer and tell then you did recover their wedding pictures or important school work. The look on their faces when they come in to pick up the freshly burned DVD with their critical data makes you forget all the mouthbreathers with their insect ridden e-machines (almost).

But then there's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you plug in the customer's PC and hear the "click BANG" or "BOING whirllllll" of a failed HDD while the BIOS reports no bootable drive. You have to look them in the eye and tell them you are already 99% sure the drive is dead and there is nothing you can do about it. You hand them the little card with the number to DriveSavers or similar professional data recovery and warn them it's going to cost a lot of money. You are kind enough not to scold them about their lack of a backup, that would only cause pain now. They already know.

Flash back to 2007. One morning I get to the shop to find a customer standing outside the front door with one of those ubiquitous claim-shell Dell PCs under an arm. The look in his eyes alone tells me all I really need to know about the situation. I tell him to come in and put the PC on the counter. We exchange niceties as I plug in the monitor and keyboard and turn it on.

We encounter the message he told me to expect, the PC can't find a bootable drive. I open it up to make sure everything is plugged in and notice the drive is not spinning. Not good, but there could be an innocent answer. I pull the drive and try it out with a known good power supply. Unfortunately with the same result.

I tell him "(Customer), it seems you have a failed hard drive. Since it won't spin up I can't really help you." His exact words: "It doesn't matter what it costs, please get my data back!" It turns out this guy is an office manager at a local veterinary practice. It must be a fairly big organization as they employ about 10 vets and about 40 other folks including cleaning staff, etc. This PC under his arm contains the entirety of their accounting everything. Payroll, tax stuff, accounts receivable, everything. He explains that they will go out of business if they can't get the data on that drive.

I let him know that data recovery from a failed drive takes specialized skills and resources, neither of which we have in this mom 'n pop computer repair outfit. I give him the DriveSavers card and tell him to be prepared for a bill in the $1000's if they are successful at all. Considering the importance of his data I thought it was a no-brainer to go this route. $2000 is nothing to a medical office likely billing out over a million dollars each year.

Well, I would not be writing this if the dude had any sense.

He's like: "$2000 for data recovery? And it might take weeks? I don't know... Can't you do it?" I tell him the truth: If I try to recover his data and fail there is a huge chance I'll make it worse and less likely for a professional data recovery specialist to get it. He really needs to go to the specialist. Yet despite this, he continues to talk me into it telling me they can't possibly go weeks without this PC. They need their data by tomorrow for tax reasons.

So I told him to give me his number and I'd do some research and get back to him. I call in my fellow nerds and we research (our Google-Fu was strong that day). We end up with a list of about 8 or so things to try to order them by risk. We even manage to find two of the same model drives from the junkyard downstairs to look at. By early afternoon I think we've learned what we can and I call the customer.

I tell him I'll try it, but it's foolish. He describes an office in pure chaos and says they are willing to take the risk. I tell him I'm going to charge $75 / hour for my time successful or not, to which he agrees. I also tell him to bring in any other Dells they purchased as the same time as the broken one as I want more drives from the same batch if possible. My boss prints out a unique addendum to our usual waver all customers sign, something to protect us from the consequences of potentially (likely) destroying this data and the other PC drives as well.

Guy shows up 15 minutes later with sweat on his brow and three more clam-shell Dells. We're lucky, the serial numbers on these drives are close enough be the same batch as the broken one. These are a better match than the drives we already found. So we now have the one failed drive and three good ones. I go shopping to pick up items needed for the potential data recovery methods. I purchase some dry ice, a couple of torque bits and eyeglass screwdriver to fit, ziplock bags, and microfiber gloves from a photography shop. I try to make arrangements with a buddy who works in a chip fabrication plant to use their clean room if needed. That was impossible but he was able to get me a couple of those dust free bunny suits and face masks. Unfortunately they were pink. But this was war so I did not complain.

The first thing I try is swapping the PCB between a good drive and the failed one. The good drive works fine with the failed drive's PCB, but the opposite is not true. Next we tried putting the drive in a USB enclosure and plastic bags and cooling the drive with the dry ice. After 1/2 hour we tried again, again without success. I then tried powering the drive and kinda spinning it back and forth hoping to jump start the motor (or something?). Needless to say that was not working. We needed to open the drive up and see what secrets might be inside. We took apart one of the three good drives to see if it was even possible to do a platter swap. I've taken apart many drives and knew the most difficult part would be not damaging the heads. Sometimes you have to remove the arms holding the heads to even get the platter out. But luck was on our side! The arm in these particular drives could be pushed down and would not get in the way when we pulled the platters! Even better they smoothly went back onto the platters
without hanging when you carefully pushed it back.

I dawned the bunny suit, much to the delight of the other nerds, and took the drive and tools into the bathroom. I set an audiobook playing and started scrubbing wall to ceiling with wet rags to collect all the dust I could. I taped over the air vent and along the door frame. Then I collected hot water into a trash can and added the dry ice. That much dry ice in that small room made quite a bit of fog which supposedly helps bring any dust out of the air. I don't know if this actually works, but I was concerned about adding that much CO2 into a small sealed room. I made it a point to hold my breath if I was reaching down to the floor. After the fog was gone I noticed no ill effects and proceeded to phase 3.

The actual platter swap went without incident and hardly warrants description in this story. Just a few screws and aluminum spacer rings. I just tried to line up the two platters so they were aligned the same way relative to each other in the new case. Obviously I could not get nearly the same level of precision at the physical scale of the data on the drive, but I did the best I could.

We held our breath while we booted up the bench PC with a Linux data recovery live CD. It found the drive! I started to read an image from the drive, which seemed to work fine. I did a typical data recovery on the image and I FOUND FILES!!! I actually recovered that data! The customer was thrilled and didn't blink an eye at the bill (something like $700) or the fact we destroyed the other drives in the other PCs. I even got a $100 tip for risking O2 deprivation and the ridicule of my peers. That evening we had pizza and Mountain Dew paid for out of the register. I kicked butt at Counter Strike. My wife called to say my Mother in Law was not able to visit after all. It was the perfect day.




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axbaby
axbaby
Joined: 22 Dec 1999
Posts: 17369
PostPosted: 03-29-2013 11:27 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I dropped a portable hard drive and I was left with a raw partition.
I found software online that was able to recover my files from raw.

It works, as I recall a lot of the free raw file programs were loaded with viruses so watch out.
It took 24 hours to get my files back, the software was slow but I won.



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I'm the dude!
I'm the dude!
Joined: 04 Feb 2002
Posts: 12498
PostPosted: 03-30-2013 06:04 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


And the download link or name of the software was..........



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Glayven?
Glayven?
Joined: 23 Jan 2005
Posts: 13025
PostPosted: 03-30-2013 07:36 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


lol @ ax :smirk:




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axbaby
axbaby
Joined: 22 Dec 1999
Posts: 17369
PostPosted: 03-31-2013 05:53 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


obsphincter If I could remember I would have mentioned it.



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Legend
Legend
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Posts: 16498
PostPosted: 03-31-2013 01:27 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


You posted that you used Recuva and R-Studio, then deleted your post to feign forgetfulness? Nice T&T modding bro.




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Your Other Daddy
Your Other Daddy
Joined: 03 Dec 1999
Posts: 20012
PostPosted: 03-31-2013 02:15 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


i never said i used them and i think i mixed up r-studio with a different r-studio which is a diamond tool

don't worry, it'll be up shortly

after surgery here so i';m very buzzed on percs



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Your Other Daddy
Your Other Daddy
Joined: 03 Dec 1999
Posts: 20012
PostPosted: 03-31-2013 02:19 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote




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