Damaged Hard Drives

[Dart]

From Swordys post i been thinking
is were anyway to recover data from a damaged drive
as i had a drive with alot of my stuff die

 

[Rochdale]

It depends, if your BIOS can still see it then you could possibly use Norton ghost to copy contents of the drive over to a new drive. I've done that with an unbootable hard drive before.

 

[Slim_reefer]

There are companies out there that recover data from drives that are no longer readable by your OS. Basically it involves either removing the platters or replacing the drive head/controller.

Obviously this has to be done in a sterile enviroment and is therefore, so I have been told, bloody expensive. But then it depends how valuable your data is

Ithangyoo

 

[Ky]

Don't listen to Slim. He's an arsebandit.



Nah, he's right actually. But still don't listen to him, it doesn't happen very often.

 

[Mithrandir]

If it's a hard drive failiure, then you need professional data retreival - costs around $1,000 per megabyte I believe - and that's just for raw data (not your files back) - and they don't guarantee results. I am told that they attempt to mate working parts of identical drives with the platters from your dead drive to read the contents, which sometimes works, depending on what state your platters are in.

Worst is if your hard drive heads have 'crashed' (touched the surface of the platters) - chances are they've torn the surface to shreds, in which case you have absolutely no chance of recovering anything at all from the drive. In any case, it'd probably be cheaper to hire someone to write all your documents again

Hmm, sorry to paint such a gloomy picture... cheer up, there's always song and dance and chocolate biscuits!