I had a hard drive crap out on me last fall, and there were a couple of important files that I wanted to get off of it, but it was deader than a doornail. Tonight, I stuck it in the freezer for a few hours, and then hooked it up via USB, and amazingly, it clunked to life long enough for me to retrieve what I needed. Worth a shot if you're ever in the same boat.

what gave you that idea?

I had seen it mentioned somewhere on the web a while back when I was scouting out data recovery options. I didn't have much hope that it would work, but figured it was worth a shot.

Shhhhhh!! DOOD!

Don't be dumpin trade secrets out there like that!

That little trick makes me about three bills a month.

IF, the problem is worn bearings........

The secret is safe with us... and the meta crawler that is in the thread as we speak...

I had one in that had all of our family pics on it. It was a external setup and it stopped working. My wife works for the police department and she took it in to see if their "computer forensics" guys could get the data off it. They said it was so bad, they had never seen anything like it.

It just sits there and clicks.

Here's some I'd recommend

www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/
www.essdatarecovery.com

Be prepared, it will cost better than $1K to recover your data.
----------------------------------------------------
I think these guys are the bandits I dealt with last year.
Took almost three months for 5 day turnaround.

www.optimumrecovery.com/

I remember a few programs out there that will help retrieve data on crashed drives for around $100. A guy at work a few years ago used one with good results. I doubt they will work if the drive won't spin, though.

Matthew

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That's what this drive did, too. It had started to click occasionally before it died (always a bad sign), and I waited too long to replace it. One day, it just quit. After I installed a new drive and got the machine running again, I tried hooking the bad one up via USB, but it would just click repeatedly and die. After freezing it, I had to try to power it up 3 times, but finally it went. Needless to say, I was delighted to see it show up in the Explorer window.

JrRifleCoach, we will never speak of this again ;-)

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I have used a couple of the programs from these guys, and they worked well:

http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/

The nice thing is you can download a demo version, which you can use to determine if it'll work for you (the demo version does everything but let you copy the files back to your good disk).

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LoL!!! K.

Recovery software (SW) like OnTrack and others works great IF the problem falls into their nitch.

Most of the time the problem is damaged tables that CHKDSK /R can repair. If not then some SW mfgrs like OnTrack ETC will open the drive and assist with reconstructing boot sectors or extracting raw data. I have an arsenal of products that have all worked at one time or another. But the click of death is "not good".

Over the years I've lost five drives, (yeah I count'em) and one was recovered by an data service. A few weeks ago I pulled a dead drive out of a Lacie external. Once powered up, a chip on the drives board lite up like a LED! It only lasted a few moments but was spectacular! The drive was shipped off, the quote was for $850 with a better than 85% recovery estimate.

I like the 'hand start the drive with your finger' recovery method.

It's worked a few times
LOL

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A friend of mine was just telling me he used the finger method once when desperate, and it worked. These things amaze me - the first disk drives I worked with held about 2mb, and were the size of a washing machine.

I've work with the 'removable drums' as well

My favorite old story was when they shipped out a disk platter, about the size of a pizza, before they shipped it someone put some sizzors on top, which were magnetized to help pick up paper clips, which of course erased it!

The next disk was sent out hand-cuffed to someone.

I used these 40 meg drives called Phoenix. These things were three or four platter removable drives... each unit was like 14" round or so and the drive was actually table top sized... granted you had a big table! In general, with it's cabinet, it was about the size of a dish washer.

As an aside, my first PC hard drive was a Seagate ST225... 20 meg, MFM, 5.25" half height!!!

My 1st one
Still have it too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

My first was a TRS-80 laptop. It was one of the first true laptop computers. I upgraded it to 32k RAM ($200) and the Lucent prom. Used to write field reports on the flight home and never had a stewardess ask me to secure electronic devices. My bud and I organized and ran the 1986 SCCA National convention in FtWorth from this little gem. Even had the tricked out cassette tape drive for storing data.

Yep still got it.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100_line

Also have my Tandy/IBM/DOS3.x Model 1000 EX with two 5-1/4 drives and a 10 MB had drive card. Used to play flight sims on it.