Damaged hard drive - help!

[Wickerman]

An aged neighbor of mine lost a computer to a flood last fall. His family salvaged the hard drive as there were some important documents on it. The drive was stored in the basement all wwinter next to a de-humidifieer. The other day one of the family asked me to try to retrieve the files. I loaded it into an external drive shell and it didn't seem to power on. I got nothing. I'm guessing it got shocked as they were pretty certain the computer was on when the residence got flooded.

Well, last night the guy died and they would like to get into the hard drive to find some info for his obituary. In other words, I need to find an answer in the next few hours, if there is an answer to be had.

Any thoughts?

[Babel_17]

1. "need to find an answer in the next few hours"

Normally I'd say you would need to send it away to the specialists. But if it's the case that the drive will lose its value by the end of the day and you're willing to try anything then you MIGHT want to consider putting it in the freezer for a bit.

Try googling that temporary solution up.

Hopefully someone else has a better answer. I think the drive is toast. Did you try lightly tapping it?

[Wickerman]

3. Interesting

We'll give it a shot. I searched as you said it seems like folks have had success, but don't know that they have had such with one damaged like this one. I literally need in for about 3 minutes. I'll try tapping it first, then, if needed, into the freezer it will go!

Thanks, we have an 8 PM deadline so the FD can get the obit to the papers.

[lpbk2713]

2. If you want to try this yourself ....

as opposed to having a data retrieval specialist work on it ... you can find HDD circuit boards on Ebay.

Make sure the replacement is the exact same type as the old one. You might be able to find one for around

forty bucks or so. Otherwise they can spend a few hundred to have a pro look at it with no guarantee of results.


Good luck.


Ed: Obviously this won't help you with your time frame but if there is any other data they might want off this HDD maybe you can give it a shot.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. I agree.

Call a local computer repair place or all of them. See if they have a dead drive, of the same make or model, in their recycling boxes. Pull the electronics off both of the drives and put the electronics from the "new" drive on the "old" one.

It might be a good idea to grab a few drives for replacement andf try the "old" one with the electronics from several.

If that does not work, your only choice is a data recover service. We are talking beaucoup bux, if it comes to that.

[CabalPowered]

4. Probably looking at a data recovery service

I can recommend the shop we've used in the past but these services are not cheap.

[madokie]

6. if it won't power up at all maybe go to a repair shop and see if they have the same brand of HD

and switch the electronic card on it out with the other one. in my experience the size of the drive didn't seem to matter only that they were the same brand. Just a thought about something I've done to salvage the contents of a drive before.

[Duer 157099]

7. It's probably too late, but

go over to YouTube.com and search "hard drive recovery" and you'll find lots of very interesting and helpful videos on just this sort of topic.

You can start with one like this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Kx-D1nJcv0k&feature=related

these are good too, specifically discuss swapping the pcb:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PZCI6x0x0Yg&feature=related

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Gc15AqI4owE&feature=related