failed Hard drive

[LiQuus]

Re: failed Hard drive

that sucks.... i used these guys before for a client.. http://www.1data.com/

but they charged us/him $2.8K for a laptop disk recovery....

Good luck

[Vulcan]

Re: failed Hard drive

Good luck.... PM sent

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

ahh makes sense. might have tracked down an identical drive anyway, so i'll try to swap out the PCB and see what happens.

[Vulcan]

Re: failed Hard drive

Deep Spar is both a software package and a physical device.....you need both together to work.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

Be careful with the swapping circuit boards....You have to use one that is the same version rather than just one from the same drive. As a side note I have some data recovery tools...
1) Deep Spar Imager http://www.deepspar.com/products-ds-disk-imager.html
It uses a three scan pass method.....reads the drive, images all the good parts and then goes back and jack hammers on the damaged sectors.
2) King Demi http://www.yec-usa.com/
Link seems to be currently down.
The King Demi is more of a brute force tool....you set how many times it tries to read each cluster and it bangs away on it.
3) Spinrite - Very good DOS tool for data recovery.

All three tools have recovered several hundred drives for me or at least part of the drive (All methods work the drive hard and can kill off a drive that is on its last legs). I prefer the Deep Spar as it gets all the easy to get data off right away before it goes to work on the hard to recover stuff.

do you have copy of deep spar you could FTP to me somehow?

[R_Ethug]

Re: failed Hard drive

yea i've done the freezer before works good!

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

spinrite seemed like the only one that might work, so i tried that.. and it started to work, saw the drive and then failed 2 minutes later (division flow error or something).

anyway the drive is a Seagate ST3250823A firmware 3.03.
so if anyone has this exact drive, i will definitely take it off your hands if the price is reasonable.
i could also go on ebay but dont really want to wait for shipping times, etc.

[claxx]

Re: failed Hard drive

u could try give http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
also testdisk is good as well

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

thanks i'll try these

[Vulcan]

Re: failed Hard drive

Be careful with the swapping circuit boards....You have to use one that is the same version rather than just one from the same drive. As a side note I have some data recovery tools...
1) Deep Spar Imager http://www.deepspar.com/products-ds-disk-imager.html
It uses a three scan pass method.....reads the drive, images all the good parts and then goes back and jack hammers on the damaged sectors.
2) King Demi http://www.yec-usa.com/
Link seems to be currently down.
The King Demi is more of a brute force tool....you set how many times it tries to read each cluster and it bangs away on it.
3) Spinrite - Very good DOS tool for data recovery.

All three tools have recovered several hundred drives for me or at least part of the drive (All methods work the drive hard and can kill off a drive that is on its last legs). I prefer the Deep Spar as it gets all the easy to get data off right away before it goes to work on the hard to recover stuff.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

yeah, which is the idea behind replacing the entire circuit board with an identical drive. i wouldnt want to troubleshoot the actual circuit, just replace the whole damn thing...
i tried the freezer trick and it didnt do it. although i only had it in the freezer for about an hour. but if the PCB theory is correct then the freezer trick is unrelated.

[Stonewall]

Re: failed Hard drive

I have heard if you stick them in the freezer (in a bag) sometimes you can get the info off them that you need. If the drive died from age you will not be able to tell which is the bad IC without a schematic and in depth knowledge of the circuit... well unless the part let the magic smoke out.

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

i personally agree with your theory. and is the direction i was going. i inspected the PCB for like 20 minutes with a bright light and couldnt see any damage so it's gotta be a fried chip or something. i'm going to spend the weekend looking for an identical drive....

Eric - if you find a seagate 7200.8 drive pls let me know. if you feel like it you can call my cell (PMing it to you). I will honestly pay you if you can help with this.

[Kordain]

Re: failed Hard drive

thats just a bad chip confusing it

[timdog]

Re: failed Hard drive

i actually had device manager find it for long enough to produce an error in the system event viewer.

"This disk, \device\harddisk2 has a bad sector"

which doesnt make sense, because a bad sector wouldnt ruin the entire drive, just a few files. which i could deal with.