All comments posted to this web site are opinions expressed by
the poster and/or the owner of this web site. The owner is not responsible for
comments or repairs to computers that others may do. I
will
warn you that you may be violating your computer manufacture's warrantee for
certain things. Be sure to read it before opening your computer case!
I work hard to expand this
free information.
You may express your gratitude by
donatingwith your help supporting
the server costs and help keeping the section alive.
Hard Drive Failure
by RAY
(Fort Worth, TX)
I have a 500 gb sata internal Seagate drive-Barracuda; loaded with precious information. That drive began registering as raw file system from it's original ntfs file system. It became unable to read and now it registers as unknown in the bios.
I have purchased a 1500gb sata internal Seagate Barracuda in order, to transfer those videos and information files over to it. I have formatted the 1500gb with ntfs file system and made it the primary sata drive with the 500gb sata as the secondary sata drive; which now reads in the bios as unkown.
Also, the 1500gb has WinXP sp2 operating system and the 500gb has two partitions one with WinXP sp2 and the other partition has Win Vista ultimate, which I tried to disable when I first encountered problems with the 500gb.
If it is possible at all; please recommend the solution to this predicament. I know its possible to reformat the 500gb; yet, I will lose all data and files that I must have. HELP,HELP, HELP.
Data recovery can be expensive, it can also be incomplete.
Your options are:
1) Send the drive to a company like Ontrack. This will cost about $30 a MEG. 30% chance of recovery.
2) Get some data recovery software, this will run from around $30 to $250 depending on your choice of options. My experience is about 5% recovery or less.
3) Repair the electronics on the hard drive. Cost of another drive of same make and model.
From the description of your problem it makes me believe that the electronics on the drive have failed NOT the physical part of the drive, in other words the drive spins up and you can hear the seeker head moving when you power it up? Also there are no high pitch or unusual noises?
Here is how you do the recovery -
1) This is important - Do NOT Write to the drive, actually remove the drive from the computer for now. (If you write to the drive - format you will loose your data unless you send it to a company like Ontrack)
2) Get another drive exactly like the one that failed, that is same manufacture, same make, same model. (It will be a lot cheaper than the drive was originally - I see them for less than $150 at the major electronics web sites).
3) Once you have the new drive do not install it, instead remove the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) from the new drive, set it aside, remove the PCB from the dead drive, label it as 'dead' a - piece of tape that will not come off easily. set the dead pcb aside and then take the good pcb and install it on the drive the dead pcb was on.
Install the drive back in the computer, power up and see if the computer sees the drive.
I have had a 100% recovery of data using this technique. Because the data had not been destroyed by formatting or overwriting it. The hardest part is finding the same drive after a few years.
