easty

Posts: 2,075

Country:

Thanks: 17

Thanked 19 Times in 9 Posts

Ay PC tech guru's on here. I used to be very involved in PC's so understand quite a lot, But I've played and played with a new hard drive and come up without any luck. So I'm grasping at straws.

I have a 8month old Maxtor 160gb Sata 7200rpm drive. Its my secondary drive and really only used as media storage area. Just all my images and video's. I'm really gutted as my last 6 month of photography was on there, All the high res stuff. The drive spins up with power, but if I try to connect it to any sata bank it invalidates all the drives on the PC, so none of them can be found in the bios.
any clues or idea's would be awesome, however crazy.

On a good note, my recent 8gb of images from australia I backed up straight away as I was posting to family in the UK.

__________________
"I'm not a roman mum, I'm a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I'm kosher mum, I'm a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!" Life of Brian


To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.



To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

zappajake

Posts: 11

Country:

Thanks: 0

Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts

Sorry to hear that. It's corrupted one way or another - I wouldn't screw around with it anymore. Google "data recovery" or something like that, you can find a company who will take it all off for you safely. It's usually pretty cheap, and definitely worth it to recover six months of photograpy. Best of luck.

noregret4life

Posts: 1,092

Country:

Thanks: 1

Thanked 17 Times in 11 Posts

Easty, there is software out there you can use to read all data from sectors. I recently helped a buddy of mine recover data off his busted laptop HD.
What i did was use my external laptop HD case to connect it to another computer via USB 2.0 Then used a data recovery tool to pull off all data.
Its 2am here, so i really can't remember the name of the software i used, however i will note to find it tomorrow. You can actually download the demo as far as i remember. But a good bet is to try it out on another computer, or with an external case if you can borrow someones

The data recovery services are good though... so if you opt for the pros it you have better chances, but depending on the damage, it may either be really cheap, or could get really pricy to recover.

FPF422

Posts: 852

Country:

Thanks: 0

Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts

I believe the name of the program to be "Spinrite" but it could also be just a question of Raid drivers in your bios. It's maybe just a question of bios upgrade...

mtiede

Posts: 1,642

Thanks: 100

Thanked 55 Times in 45 Posts

At work we had important data on a disk that died. (and of course backup/restore failed) And it wasn't easy to recover. It cost us about $5000 to get the data back. I don't believe it was a rip-off. I just think it died in a bad way

So anyway, professional recovery may be cheap or not. The external USB recommendation sounds like an interesting way to go.

I just bought a Seagate 250g external drive as the first of several to use for photo and video storage, as well as backup. It comes with very easy to use backup software. One button press does backup. I recommend something like that for future.

Good luck. I hope your problems are relatively simple and you can at least get your data back.

easty

Posts: 2,075

Country:

Thanks: 17

Thanked 19 Times in 9 Posts

Gravity saved all my data.

Thanks for the awesome feedback guys, and bill thanks for the software.
After hours of messing around with no positive results I'd given up and your replies certainly inspired me to carry on trooping. In the end I couldn't get it the PC booted with the problem drive in any of the SATA channels. So as bill reccomended I tried the Secondary raid channel. Although this didn't even see the drive either.

I put everything on my desk and removed no essential components, just incase it was a power issue. still nothing. Then I though well maybe if it's a mechanical issue I'll try altering the HD's world a little and took it out and sat it vertically. And it worked straight away. I'm not transferring everyhing onto my main drive. Woohoo! Surely the drive is seriously on it's way out, but I think thats just maxtor's problem now.

For the future, If I use a RAID mirrored set-up. Any one use this? is it slower and is it really a good secondary fail safe?

Thanks again for all the feedback guys.

__________________
"I'm not a roman mum, I'm a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I'm kosher mum, I'm a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!" Life of Brian


To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.



To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

DesignoSLK

Posts: 1,678

Country:

Thanks: 91

Thanked 20 Times in 15 Posts

I had a similar issue with my 2.5" laptop 80G HD. This was extremely weird, so bare with me.

All the HD would do was knock, a had the original 40G HD do the same thing so I knew the 80G was on it's way out. The 80G wouldn’t allow Windows to load completely leaving the laptop basically non-operational. I have an external USB case for a 2.5" HD so I removed it, installed it to the external case and tried to run it up on my wife's laptop. It seemed like it wasn’t getting enough power to operate, so I took it to work to plug into my desktop. Well, it worked briefly until the circuit card got hot. I figured cold solder joints on the card because it basically ran 24/7 for a year.

I'm a 25+ yr. electronic tech so I understood the whole cold solder joint thing...anyway...I figured since my building is kept ice cold, it probably was cold enough to operate until the pcb got too hot and opened the joint(s) again.

OK, here's the weird part. I'm not a genius, but I figured if it would operate for a little bit while in a cold environment, it would operate longer in a colder environment. Soooo, I put it in the freezer for 20 minutes. I pulled it out and it worked for about 5 minutes until it got too hot again.

Then I got some canned air from the IT guys. For those of you who don't know, canned air works great as freeze spray when sprayed upside down. “Shooting” the pcb with freeze spray, I got it to continue working long enough for me to pull about 10G off it until I ran out of canned air. I still needed to pull about 20G off so I put it in the freezer again. Only this time I ran the USB cable from the HD in the freezer to a laptop working from the top of the mini frig in my office.

And PRESTO!! I was able to get all the info off the HD and then reformatted it. Luckily the HD had a 3 yr. warranty and I was able to get it replaced free of charge.

I no longer leave the computer running 24/7 anymore. That works OK for full size HDs, but not for 2.5" HDs running at 7200 rpm. Lesson learned.

__________________
Kevin
An American in Germany...
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

'00 SLK230 Designo copper, '06 Saturn Vue, Cessna 172 (pilot)

RacerCub68

Posts: 710

Country:

Thanks: 0

Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts

What software do you use for recovery? I usually use File Recovery Pro which is good getting it back even if you FDisked and Formatted. It also runs well off a regular bootable CD.

easty

Posts: 2,075

Country:

Thanks: 17

Thanked 19 Times in 9 Posts

I just got my new drive from maxtor. I made a mistake the new one that failed was 300gb. the original was 150gb. My mind cannot compute these numbers anymore, there just so large. Anyhow they sent me a 500gb Grizzly drive. I'm nor complaining.

__________________
"I'm not a roman mum, I'm a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I'm kosher mum, I'm a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!" Life of Brian


To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.



To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

DesignoSLK

Posts: 1,678

Country:

Thanks: 91

Thanked 20 Times in 15 Posts

I would say, in this case bigger is not better. If your computer hickups, as they always do regardless of OS, it will take forever to do a condition scan. You'd have been better to have them send you 2 smaller HDs. IMHO

__________________
Kevin
An American in Germany...
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

'00 SLK230 Designo copper, '06 Saturn Vue, Cessna 172 (pilot)

easty

Posts: 2,075

Country:

Thanks: 17

Thanked 19 Times in 9 Posts

Ah thats the first HD problem I've had in about.. well many years.. I used to have a 286 sx once.

__________________
"I'm not a roman mum, I'm a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I'm kosher mum, I'm a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!" Life of Brian


To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.



To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 5 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.