Dead Hard Drive

[CapriRS302]

Okay, so I turned on my machine last night and instead of seeing my intro video I get a pop up message saying that such and such an emulator is not valid blah blah blah.  After further investigation I found that my hard drive had just disappeared! (it was a secondary drive) I did all of the normal stuff, checked cables, rebooted a hundred times, tried the drive in another machine, and yes, I even stuck it in the freezer for an hour...

So, I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to get the information off of a dead hard drive so that I do not have to start over from scratch, and REDOWNLOAD EVERYTHING!!!

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks

[PsychoMikey]

Well, there are a few different tricks/tips you can try at this point, but it all depends on the way the drive is failing.
I've had some great results with freezing disks and then reconnecting them. (quick google link: http://www.knowledgesutra.com/forums/topic/26193-hard-drive-freezer-trick/)

There are also special company's that will extract all possible data from crached drives but its very expansive and take's a long time. Then i would definitly redownload. That way you get a nice and clean install.

[NOP]

if the drive isn't making any weird or bad sounds, and appears to be spinning up properly, then it may be the PCB on the drive.  You can often find either bare PCBs or used hard drives on fleabay.  The trick is that you've got to get a drive/PCB that is as absolutely close to the one you have currently.  There should be some date codes and other identification bits on the PCB and stickers on the drive that you can use to narrow down the field of available drives.  An ideal candidate should also have the same firmware version that you have on your dead drive.

If you can find such a thing, swapping out PCBs is really easy, it's just some torx screws.

I've done it once.  Saved me some hours for sure.

I used to take the approach of "that drive can go-there's nothing I can't get back again (by downloading) on it" and then realized that there are hours and hours of time spent both collecting, sorting and organizing whatever files are on your drives.  *everything* is worth backing up.  I've promised myself that I will never have to reconstruct again. 

[VanillaGorilla]

if the drive isn't making any weird or bad sounds, and appears to be spinning up properly, then it may be the PCB on the drive.  You can often find either bare PCBs or used hard drives on fleabay.  The trick is that you've got to get a drive/PCB that is as absolutely close to the one you have currently.  There should be some date codes and other identification bits on the PCB and stickers on the drive that you can use to narrow down the field of available drives.  An ideal candidate should also have the same firmware version that you have on your dead drive.

If you can find such a thing, swapping out PCBs is really easy, it's just some torx screws.

I've done it once.  Saved me some hours for sure.

I used to take the approach of "that drive can go-there's nothing I can't get back again (by downloading) on it" and then realized that there are hours and hours of time spent both collecting, sorting and organizing whatever files are on your drives.  *everything* is worth backing up.  I've promised myself that I will never have to reconstruct again. 

What he said. This can save you upwards of $1000......

[patm95]

There is a program called spinright that can sometimes save a hard drive that has a few bad sectors. This might help u enough to get a new drive and transfer info.

[gShooter]

This might be a long shot since you said you checked all the cables (assume you tried replacing them), is that the issue may lie with your MB.  Once a drive starts acting up, I usually use an external connection to try to recover/transfer data.  It allows you to try more options without having to keep opening up your main machine for each item you try.

[BadMouth]

Does the drive show up in your bios?

Longshot, but free to try.......  partition magic.
I was trying my hand at a dual-boot system and windows deleted my partitions. 
The drive wouldn't show up until I used partion magic to restore the partitions.
I believe it will also show you if part of the hard drive is corrupt.

[chriso]

Another tool to try is RoadKil's RawCopy.

http://www.roadkil.net/listing.php/C2/Disk%20Utilities

It'll copy from an internal to a USB caddy drive and attempt repair as it does it.
It will run within windows or from boot CD/USB stick.


 

[pincky]

I've used the Freezer trick before and it has worked

but use it to extract data via a usb to IDE converter ONLY

I got an IBM Deskstar AKA DeathSTAR 160gb that just crashed on me gonna by a 1TB HD next month
I have a bunch of saved stuff on it I need to pull off of it and the freezer trick works.


Pincky

[tommyinajar]

Even if the Freezer (In a ziplock bag, overnight) does work, there is no way in He** you are going to be able to transfer the roms file and other big ones over. The drive will heat up too fast. Just grab your ini and config or HI scores whatever takes time to set up again. I just lost a TB drive out of the blue, but luckily had backups of the important stuff. With the sub $60 price of a 1TB and the cheap usb sata docking stations, back that stuff up !!