Hard Drive Died- Trying to Recover Pictures from Dead Drive
I am having computer week from hell. After horrible upgrade this week to top it all off an external drive started making nasty clanking sound when I turned it on. was working perfectly 2 days ago and no signs of trouble. Last night my hard started making a ominous clanking sound. Its like a “clack clack clack” and must be platters banging around. GULP.
We have had this drive for about 3 years. It has all my photos on it. I am an idiot. Almost 200 gigs of family photos. Just writing about it makes me want to cry. Its not a matter of getting the drive recognized. the hard drives spins and then stops after about 1 minute.
I tried to yank drive out and connect directly to PC and still a problem. My one last attempt it to put in in freezer over night.
Did I just say I was putting my failed hard drive in freezer? yes.
This is an old trick. It has never worked for me but I am DESPERATE. My hard drive is in deep freeze.
In am I will grab it quickly and connect and if it works will grab as much data as I can. I have very little hope that this will work but I do know some people who swear by the hard drive in freezer method.
I may have to look at big bucks to pay some one to do it for me.
I would be thrilled to hear of ways to recover data from a dead drive, please feel free to share.
Note: ALL I told you so comments that mention I should have backed will be go in my pile of Bad Karma folder.
Please let us know if the freezer trick worked for you. I have a dead HD from another computer and it has some files that I want to recover. Thankfully I backed up my photos.
i have some data if you want to restore this image use the following command
#dd_rescue /dev/sda2/backup.img /dev/sda1
If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command
sudo dd_rescue /dev/sda2/backup.img /dev/sda1
I wrote a entire article on my computer blog about saving computer files from unbootable hard drive. Once I had the same problem as you and I had to learn hard way how to overcome this problem. And I did it. If you want to read about visit my techsite.
http://www.pcterritory.net
One trick I’ve used is to install the problem drive in another PC as the slave drive. Windows starts, sees the ‘bad’ drive, and runs chkdsk to fix it. Both times for me, this has worked fine. Obviously, if you can get the bad drive to boot, you don’t need this, but in both cases, the owners didn’t have any recovery software, Win CD’s, etc, so this was a last ditch effort that worked.