mechanical hard drive fail

John wells

John wells

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looking for ideas as to how to recover my data?

help required
 
I think you may have to go to a specialist computer expert who may be able to recover your data. That is what I did when my hard drive failed, he recovered my client base and animal boarding program which had over 3,000 clients on it at the time. he sent it back to the manufacturers who replaced it with a larger hard drive. It use to be that Maxtor hard drives had a 3 year warranty apart from the computer one but i don't know if that is still going.
From our experience the well known shops just arn't knowledgeable enough they will just swap a new drive for old as they did with my wifes Mac laptop and loose yours with the information on it.

That is one of the reasons a bought an SSD (solid state drive) for my new computer as there is no moving parts
 
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it's a storage drive only so the OS and programmes are safe but all my photos for the last 6-10 yrs are hanging in the balance, if I get them back I think I'm going to have a few private Flickr accounts and use them for free storage
 
drive failure Neil apparently, weird clicking sound then gone
 
Tick of death, always a sign of imminent failure. If you don't have a backup of your data then its probably going to end up costing £100s through a recovery company.

Is it an internal drive or a usb?

Ssd aren't immune to hardware failures either, except generally the warning is generally non existant.
 
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neil_g said:
Ssd aren't immune to hardware failures either, except generally the warning is generally non existant.
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Plus the more limited mtbf of writes compared to most non ssd. So yes not sure a probable shorter life combined with lower warning likelihood really makes sense as a solution to me either ;)
 
its an internal, has anyone used any of these companies, the first was quite happy to tell me the nature of the issue and how they charge £400 plus VAT..
 
Making an asumption that you are capable of removing the HD from the PC & also have another working PC with USB ports, as suggested, BUY / BEG / BORROW an external caddy & put the drive into that.
A lot of time the reason that the drive has failed to boot into the operating system is that the BOOT SECTOR / TABLE has failed or become corrupt.
As placing it into a caddy it then doen't require this area of the drive & so you MAY then be able to access some / all of your data.

This should always be your first option & is usually fairly succcessful.
 
Hi Pete

thanks for the suggestion but already done, the mac has four bays so already removed and i had a caddy with my old macbook pro so tried that and its simply not recognising a drive connected at all
 
John wells said:
its an internal, has anyone used any of these companies, the first was quite happy to tell me the nature of the issue and how they charge £400 plus VAT..
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That's not excessive, and could go higher. If the drive mechanism has failed, then the recovery process involves removing the platters and putting them into another casing. This has to be done in a clean room environment.
 
try it plugged into a windows pc..

& the £400 quote can go north very quickly.....
 
John see your PM as in " start a conversation" look at your "in " box
 
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thanks Sphexx but I've been told it's a mechanical fault so not sure this would work as the disk isn't even appearing on the mac
 
I've seen a few places offering fixed price work which in light of the current quote seem reasonable
 
As said above attach the drive to a windows PC, using a powered hub/connector

Power the hub up and then boot up the windows PC, look in my computer

Please don't just dismiss the suggestion, give it a try - you have nothing to loose and everything to gain
 
It may sound really weird but you could put it into a plastic bag then put it into your freezer overnight.

The next day re-connect it and see if it boots.

A few years ago lightning striking my house blew all the electrics and totally screwed my PC.

After getting another one I did the freezer trick on the HDD then installed it as the second drive and managed to recover almost all the data.
.
 
Peter how much data did you manage to recover, this is a large drive albeit not full
 
take it to a specialist and then invest in some decent backup solution or cloud storage.
 
John wells said:
its an internal, has anyone used any of these companies, the first was quite happy to tell me the nature of the issue and how they charge £400 plus VAT..
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Sounds quite cheap. I'd have thought double that would be a good price.
 
not sure whats good about £400 let alone £800…

need a cheap/free cloud solution for raw files..
 
John wells said:
not sure whats good about £400 let alone £800…

need a cheap/free cloud solution for raw files..
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If it's a mechanical failure which requires a few hours in a clean room dismantling the platters and rebuilding the drive, £400 is cheap.

You may be lucky, it may be curable by using a caddy and some freezer spray. If the disk won't spin due to a hardware failure then some cheap software won't help.
 
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we discussed it at home tonight, I'm going to take it to the local computer place, they've got a good reputation and while not specialist will assess where we are at with the drive, while there are photos on there i wouldn't want to loose after the initial disappointment I've partially moved on if that makes sense.

£400 is possibly too much for memories i haven't looked at in years so might cut my losses
 
just looking at that Andy $11 per year is very cheap, have you used it?
 
John wells said:
just looking at that Andy $11 per year is very cheap, have you used it?
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I meant the Prime service that gets you free next day delivery and video etc for £79 per year, but I've just found the standalone service - $12 is amazingly cheap.

I've been using it as my secondary backup - somewhere to put all my RAW files as well as on local storage. It's not the most user friendly service, but seems OK.
 
i was hoping for flickr as its free but it won't allow raw files, so Amazon looks cheap and as long as i can organise into shoot folders I'm happy with that small fee per year
 
John wells said:
i was hoping for flickr as its free but it won't allow raw files, so Amazon looks cheap and as long as i can organise into shoot folders I'm happy with that small fee per year
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You can indeed create folders and subfolders as you require.
 
loos like the one for me Andy, me too Peter but my sd card is bigger and that's the issue is that as files get bigger we will just blast through that level, Amazon at roughly £8 a year is probably the way forward for me
 
Cloud backup is the future for all these needs.
Amazon Cloud looks good, I use Hubic as I have my own business so my stuff is VERY important so I pay a bit more to have full file/folder replication.

@John wells you get what you pay for dude.
 
The cloud only works well if your data connection speeds are adequate - worth considering how many weeks it would take to upload your data.
 
Thanks Shreds

Guys I've a reasonable broadband speed and bandwidth so cloud shouldn't be an issue i believe
 
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