HOW TO REVIVE A DEAD HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD)

[Ademil4vic]

Good morning
 It really amased me this morning on onning my pc and heard unstopped sound po-po-po and this simply means that the drive's life span is out.
 So, how can i revive it or bring it back to life or to retrieve my datas from it

[quaxo]

When a drive reaches that point, there is no way to bring it back aside from maybe finding a professional data recovery service near you. They can attempt to retrieve the data, but it doesn't guarantee they will be able to.

[install4you]

I recently had my hard drive stop working.  I called and researched and found these options:

• Use a local authorized repair center for my brand of computer.  They crack open the drive, rebuild the mechanism, and read the info.  Cost $150.00  More cost to rebuild the file structure.  Add in cost of a drive to put the recovered data on.  BIG drawback--no clean room.  Everything is done in open air. Almost guarantees max 1-week life of repaired drive.  If platter damaged--no chance.
• Use any of many large data recovery businesses you can find on the internet.  Most have clean rooms so recovery process on undamaged platter is more reliable than #1. Cost $1000.00 to $5000.00 OUCH! The best of these can often recover a disk that stumps many others.  I don't know how to begin to choose one of these.
• I found a company in Atlanta that has a flat rate for two levels of service--$349.00 and $649.00.  They have a clean room and lots of experience.

I chose #3.  They were able to do a 99.99% recovery.  Within the $649 service they had to rebuild the mechanism twice to be able to read it. They attempted to clone my old drive onto a new one and thought/hoped I would be able to plug it in, boot up, and go on as if nothing had happened.  Apparently there were either some proprietary/hidden files or small glitches that kept that from working.  The new drive they sold me was at a decent price. Anyway, I have my data back.  Oh...they also changed their company policy about cloning drives based on my experience.  If they don't have the computer in hand to test before sending the recovered drive back, they won't attempt the cloning route.

I don't remember if forum rules allow me to name the specific business I used, but maybe I gave you enough info to search/find it.

I'm certainly no expert.  Just sharing info about my experience.   Good luck!

[Geek-9pm]

Amazing! Did they really get back most of your data?

Thanks for sharing. You story is credible. The only way to cut costs would be to move the operation to Mexico. The labor cost is very high. Plus special equipment for reading flaky media.

But there is no excuse for not having a clean room.Some fans, filters, smocks,masks and a little innovation you can make a small clean room. That is not the big cost factor.

Here in California there are independent firms the do data recovery buy do not rebuild the drive. IMHO rebuilding a drive is pointless for most desktop systems.

If you want, give a link to their site. But either I or someone else may give a link to somebody that is cheaper. If you don't need to get better than 97% of the data and don't want the drive rebuilt.

[DaveLembke]

I use a software tool called GetDataBack NTFS that retrieved data off of a clunking drive. It was able to rebuild 95% of the data to a good drive and recover important work for a client. They have a free trial you can try, and see if it works before you buy it. Upon seeing the data there, you can then buy it for around $80 and be able to transfer the data to a healthy drive. Process took 5 days to sweep and reconstruct data from bad hard drive to healthy drive. I was truely amazed that a hard drive with the clunk failure of the head sweep, could still be interacted with by a windows program and recover data.

I have been able to repair my own drives before also by finding a same exact model with same exact date code drive, with same firmware version on the drive controller board and swap the controller board that is on the hard drive carefully. If you have a same exact drive with different date code/rev and/or different firmware version your data is probably inaccessible.

Also attempted once to transfer platters from one drive that had a bad motor that wouldnt spin to a healthy same drive with matching date codes/rev, and firmware, but the platters have to be placed exactly back into same 360 degree orientation on the drive you are moving them to or else data is out of position and useless.

Once I was able to drill into the motor shaft on a bad motor drive, tap it to take a stand off and then take another junk hard drive and drill and tap the center of its shaft and use that other drives motor to spin the drive with the bummed motor to be able to get the data off of it. Had to add a piece of rubber hose between the 2 stand offs to act as a lovejoy fitting. Quite the hardware hack to get data back, but it worked.

[install4you]

Amazing! Did they really get back most of your data?

Yes I think so.  The company is Data Savers, LLC in Alanta, GA.  The people are nice and I'm happy with my choice.  I just didn't want to risk the open-air repair option and knew I couldn't afford the really high-end companies.

Keep in mind that every data recovery is unique.  Some failures are in the motors, some in the bearings, some in the read head, some in the platter itself, etc.  From what they said my platter was virtually perfect but they had to rebuild the heads twice.  Normally, when they return the old drive they have removed the rebuilt mechanism to be used again but they were so busy at the time, mine came back in working order.  NEVER count on using the rebuilt drive for ANYTHING except to copy off all your information onto a new drive.

There are a couple of issues with my recovered data, but I don't really fault Data Savers.  Reread my other comments and then add that I have been so swamped with critical stuff to do I haven't had time to complete my process.  You can also look in the MS-DOS forum at my post named (close to) "finishing a hard drive recovery" for a better picture of what I'm having to do.

Good luck to all.