Hard drive recovery

Hey all,

I was wondering if anyone of you kind people could maybe lead me in the right direction. I have a corrupt harddrive that is just sitting downstairs, and ive been bored lately, can anyone maybe give me some help here on a way to recover the information from the harddrive?

Tips or anything would be much appreciated, or even some links to a tutorial or something if there is one. Thank you in advance

–r3drock3t88

Stick it in a ziplock, put in freezer overnight, then quickly take out and stick in pc. Will only help it temporarily, long enough to grab files you need.

please tell me thats a joke….lol

I'm not, actually.

Google 'harddisk +freezer' if you don't believe me :/

Or jst click here if ur too lazy.

yea ninja, after posting this and doing some more research i found a bunch of sites saying the same thing. put in zip lock then freeze it over night and with luck you'll temporarily have an operating hard drive. What it does is compress the hard drive, making the data easier to read. pretty neat! Thanks bluemoose

That is simply, AWESOME! I have never heard of that working, but I have to try it now. :happy:

It all depends if the hard drive has the power to spin up. One thing that I have learned is that if your drive has no power, chances are it is the controller board on the bottom of the drive. You can easily remove it (usually requires a hex screwdriver) and if you can find another IDENTICAL drive that works, you can exchange them which usually gets your drive to power up (please note: the drives must have identical model numbers). I would honestly recommend the freezer thing, though it will work sometimes, as a last resort as this usually damages the platters of the drive due to moisture…take it from me, I have been doing data recovery for the past 2 years. There are also many programs out there that will help you get data off a hard drive that has a lot of bad sectors, two of my personal favorites are Active Undelete and OnTrack Data Recovery Professional. If the data is just corrupted, you may find the OnTrack software to work to your benefeit becuase it has the ability to "uncorrupt" MS Office documents and .pst files from Outlook.

Yes, freezing your HDD could work :)

If you can start the HDD but can't see any files, use a file recovery program http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tg=dl-20&qt=file%20recovery&tag=srch

For recovering the data you could also try http://www.diydatarecovery.nl Stellar's prods are also good..

i've nt had much luck with active undelete and OnTrack… I've uploaded the file..hope this helps http://rapidshare.com/files/16538445/Data_Recovery.rar.html

DiskPatch Feature summary: MBR Repair (boot code & partition tables) Partition Table Repair; unlike other tools, DiskPatch can restore access to logical partitions Advanced Boot Sector Repair (FAT, FAT32, NTFS) [] MBR, Partition Table & LDM Backup Disk Editor (RAW hex, ASCII, Partition Table, Boot Sector) [] Basic Partition Table Management; Set Active Partition, Partition hiding/unhiding Undo feature for all automatic repairs Surface Scan; read-only and non destructive read/write [] Disk Cloning, even when logical damage or bad sectors exist [] Forensic mode [] Disk Compare [] Low Level Format (pattern write or wipe) [] State File; once a disk has been scanned (using the demo-version) the scan can be skipped the next time Extensive logging Boot Disk Builder; from Windows you can easily create a bootable diskette that starts DiskPatch [] - Available in Pro or higher Edition only! [**] - Available in Tech Edition only!