Funeral Preparations For Your Dead Hard Drive
Question: I’ve got a Maxtor 250 GB firewire internal hard drive that crashed. One of the two partitions could not be read by Windows XP Home. I used FindNTFS to copy the files off of it, so happily, nothing was lost.
I’ve tried running both Seagate’s SeaTools and Western Digital’s Diagnostics utilities to see what happened. SeaTools sees the drive, but it doesn’t respond to any tests, and WD Diagnostics doesn’t even see it to try running tests.
Could you recommend additional tools or recovery solutions before I declare the hard drive officially dead? I’d appreciate any advice.
Answer: Do some additional tests first: Put the hard drive into a USB enclosure and see if it comes up. If it does, copy everything off of it and put it onto a stable drive.
Remove the drive and connect it to your desktop’s native drive controller (PATA or SATA). If the enclosure’s controller or bridge died, the drive should mount like a typical IDE drive.
Remove the hard drive from your system, and bring it to a friend’s house or install it into another computer install as a secondary device.
If it still doesn’t work, the only solution to your problem now is to use a file recovery software. PC Inspector File recovery is not perfect but completely free and worth a shot. Never install this recovery software on the drive from which you intend to recover data! The software must be installed and run on a second, independent drive.
Hopefully, PC Inspector will let you recover your data. If not, you can always ask experts to do the job for you:
First Advantage
Nucleus Data Recovery
TechFusion
DTI Data Recovery
Hard Drive Recovery Group
Drive Savers
More resources:
- Beginners Guides: Hard Drive Data Recovery
- Try to avoid that scenario by using a utility that provides continuous backup. SyncBack Freeware v3.2.14 copies the files you define every time they are saved plus more features.
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