Hard disk recovery (1 Viewer)

[Beast]

So yesterday my wonderful wife tripped over the power cord running to my laptop, pulling it to the floor.. Now the hard drive's making a lovely clicking sound and Windows won't boot..

I've seen that people have had success freezing a drive and then pulling data off of it, so I took the drive out and put it in a ziplock bag and into the freezer last night.. I'm going to try to retrieve data off of it this evening..

Anyone have any other suggestions for either

a) a way to recover data
or
b) a cheap drive recovery service

 

[buzd]

When you are retrieving the data (from the frozen disk), don't try to boot from it - get a USB enclosure and attach it to another machine. Get the important data off as fast as you can - this trick doesn't work for very long (if at all). Sometimes you can refreeze it for a little more time.

All data recovery services are expensive (hundreds of dollars), so it will depend on how valuable that data is (and how much of it there is). There's a shop in Houston that I've used successfully, and while it wasn't cheap, the cap on how much they will charge you was lower than most places (it ended up costing about $800). http://www.abcdatarecovered.com/ YMMV.

 

[Beast]

Yeah, I probably do need to find an enclosure..

I was hoping I might be able to boot from it.. I've got a USB hard drive that I could connect to the laptop and try to get the data off as quickly as possible..

 

[buzd]

The problem is that booting requires a lot more disk activity, including writes (swap/log files, etc) and can potentially damage the disk worse, depending on the nature of the damage.

 

[Beast]

Well, I got a 3.5" SATA enclosure that the 2.5" laptop drive fit into (of course) and tried it out.. No luck.. The laptop the enclosure was plugged into would pick up that a storage device was plugged into the USB drive, but wouldn't display the drive in MyComputer.. The enclosure (from Antec) didn't come with any special software either..

So I just bought a 160Gb 3.0Gb/s SATA Toshiba drive off of Newegg for $80.. And Dell's sending me an XP recovery disk, which I couldn't find..

I guess I'll be busy re-downloading stuff this week..