Data Recovery of dead/unresponsive HDD

Tydmors

Tydmors

New member
Hi all,

I'm looking for some help.

Something happened last weekend and our server crashed...

The OS is completely busted it keeps on asking to be repaired but then restarts after a few seconds.

I have connected the HDD to another PC in the office, it picks up the drive but once you click on it, it starts to hang, you cannot right click on it or double click on it, the pc just sits there and loads all the time, i have left it for a few hours the other day but it did not open the drive.

I cannot access the drive via command prompt either.

When I connected the drive to the other machine it took the machine close to an hour to start up.

My question to all of you tech miracle workers are.... do you know of anybody that can recover data from an unresponsive HDD.

Thank you all in advance.
 
Can you hear clicking sound from the HDD?
If it's the reader arm that's bugged, I cannot offer any advice.

Else, you can try to clone the HDD with a live linux CD.
You will need:
- 1x formated HDD the size of the faulty HDD
- 1x DVD
- Linux (i like ubuntu, but other versions should have DD that comes with it): http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Burn the linux ISO, as bootable, on DVD. Boot from written disc and follow this guide:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/clone-a-hard-drive-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/
 
chan0o said:
Can you hear clicking sound from the HDD?
If it's the reader arm that's bugged, I cannot offer any advice.

Else, you can try to clone the HDD with a live linux CD.
You will need:
- 1x formated HDD the size of the faulty HDD
- 1x DVD
- Linux (i like ubuntu, but other versions should have DD that comes with it): http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Burn the linux ISO, as bootable, on DVD. Boot from written disc and follow this guide:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/clone-a-hard-drive-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/
Click to expand...

there is not clicking sound that i could hear.

Thanks i will try and follow the instructions?

Should the 2nd hdd be the same size?

We have 2 hdd's here, a 1TB and a 1.5TB it is the 1.5 TB that i need files on, but it is not more that 100GB of data.
 
Tydmors said:
Should the 2nd hdd be the same size?
We have 2 hdd's here, a 1TB and a 1.5TB it is the 1.5 TB that i need files on, but it is not more that 100GB of data.
Click to expand...

I would suggest the backup hdd be the same or bigger in storage size.
This is because dd copies everything, even empty bytes, over to the backup drive.

Not sure if it is clever enough to stop writing once the hdd is full.
I have not tried with a backup hdd that is smaller than the original :o
 
chan0o said:
I would suggest the backup hdd be the same or bigger in storage size.
This is because dd copies everything, even empty bytes, over to the backup drive.

Not sure if it is clever enough to stop writing once the hdd is full.
I have not tried with a backup hdd that is smaller than the original :o
Click to expand...

Thank you chan0o, i will try it at home this weekend with 2 old hdd's and see if it does anything weird.
 
If the data is important then rather give the drive to a pro. Messing with it first will reduce the chances that a professional recovery service can save it.
 
I had a similar issue a while back, with my Pc's OS HDD becoming completely unresponsive...

I mounted it on a Linux PC, and was able to copy all the data off it without any problems. The drive failed Seagate tests and was completely broken, yet I could get all data off with Linux :)
 
chan0o said:
^^
I'm assuming linux live disc couldn't read the hdd either?
Click to expand...

have not tried it yet, once things die down a bit i will give it a shot. wanted to do it today but had to handle loads of other k@k so far today.

i created a bootable ubuntu USB that i will try out.
 
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