Hard Drive Failure ¬¬

[pompalomp]

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[shaithis]

2 things spring to mind to temporarily get it going.....and before you ask, both suggestions are serious...

1. Get a nice thick phonebook, open it roughly in the middle and place the hdd between the pages....close the directory as best as you can and then proceed to give it a whack on a table......you need to be pretty firm with the whacks but don't put everything into it as if you are trying some herculian feat of strength!

2. If that didn't work (and the platters aren't shattered from over whacking it!), place it in a sealed bag and slap it in the freezer overnight. Take it out in the morning and connect it up...

If at this stage you can access it, get as much data off of it as possible!!

The only other possible solution would be to swap the electronics board on the drive, although as its a 160GB drive, I would suspect a mechanical, rather then an electronics failure as it's getting on now.

[pompalomp]

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[this_is_gav]

For any solution, you're going to need another hard drive or media for copying essential data off of the dying/dead drive.

Before you resort to the drastic measures, if you have a USB hard drive enclosure, try that - the controllers on them always seem far more robust than the IDE/SATA ones on the motherboard, and will often allow you to get data off the drive.

I'd try the freezer trick before you try whacking the drive off of the table too.

[pompalomp]

//redacted

[peterb]

I would say - just restore from the backup - but I'd probably get whacked with the hard drive....

Good luck with the freezer, although that seems to work best when the problem is the platter motor - hitting the drive seems to be a real measure of last resort - designed to try and park the heads, perhaps?

Diagnosing problems is difficult, but from your description, it could be the platter motor, or worse, the heads dragging on the surface. If it is the latter, anything yiu do is going to make a bad situation worse.

A data recovery company may be able to salvage it - look at anything from £350 upwards, depending on complexity. The company I used to recommend has had some bad press lately, so I'm hesitant to recommend any particular company.

[pompalomp]

//redacted

[shaithis]

Glad to hear your actually getting some data off of it

peterb: the hitting it is because the heads can get stuck, it jolts them back into a position where they can move again.....yeah it's risky to some extent but when you can't read anything at all from it, risky options and bloody expensive options are the only ones left.

I for one will be damn happy the day SSDs completely replace those antiquated mechanical drives!

[peterb]

Yes - glad to hear that the 'extreme measures' techniques have worked for you... now about your back-up strategy...