Does anyone know any good Hard Drive recovery techniques?

[jaybv6]

One of HDD has failed and it is due to the HDD controller. Does anyone have any ideas if I can get the data back that is on the disc platters? If so how?

I want to find a way of doing it myself and not taking it to a data recovery company.

[fishfreek]

If you kow it was a problem on the logic board then take a drive thats the same make/model and swap logic boards. This should solve your problem.

[jaybv6]

Is it as simple as that? Looks like I will be scouring e-Bay for second hand drives then. :D

[fishfreek]

If its the controler then ya. but it has to be the exact same make and model. If it was a read head or physical damage to a plater then you would be looking at a much more complex job.

[jaybv6]

I think it is defo the controller as when the HDD is connected the mobo cannot see any of the attached HDD's (3 in total). Disconnecting the faulty drive and the other two are fine. It's been fine for ages but ehn went all of a sudden. Must have been a power spike as I have the PC's on 24/7

[X-ale]

24/7 and no power surge/battery thingy is no good man :?

[SDK2003]

I had the same happen to me last year and I lost 120GB of precious data :cry:
I think you'll be very lucky to recover anything off it, unless you want to pay thousands for a Pro Recovery Data Lab to do it for you.

I've learnt my lesson and now have a dedicated 160GB drive purely as a backup drive and have schedule backups each week

[jaybv6]

But was the failure due to the actual platters or down to the HDD controller?

[SDK2003]

Hard Drive controller - constant clicking, Bios didn't recognise etc

Hard Drive platters won’t fail unless you drop it and they crack

[fishfreek]

Ah but the read heads will fail or the swing arm they are attached to will fail or basicly get stuck in the parked position.

[Sachmo12345]

HArd Drive recovery can be extremely expensive

[sickx]

Platters definitely crash--mechanically, and without "dropping" them.

[jaybv6]

Well mine is definitely the HDD controller. I spoke to Seagate and they refused to sell me a replacement controller aswell. So I on the look out for a Seagate Barracuda ATA II 20.4Gb rive model ST320420A.

[kiato4]

Try attaching the hard drive to the secondary controller instead of the primary and seeing if you can access it. If not, put it in another computer and try it there. If you can access it, then boot to DOS with a startup disk assuming you don't have an NTFS partition. If you don't know what that is, then if you boot to DOS and can't access C: then you have NTFS (can't access meaning there is no C:). If it's an older machine, you probably have a FAT32 partition, so you should be fine. Create a startup disk from Windows 98 or 95 as ME, XP, and 2000 won't allow you to do so. If you have those operating systems, do a search on Google to download a startup disk image.

[jaybv6]

Kiato. Thanks for the help but I have tried all that already. I am a tech Analyst but my field of expertise does not lie in Data Recovery.

The problem is that the faulty HDD Controller (which is part of the HDD) is causing the Mo Bo not to see any drive if the faulty one is connected. I have tried the drive in 4 other PC's all with varying motherboards. The drives are in fact NTFS but I am able to see my other drives from Dos (using NTFSDOS) without the faulty HDD connected. That's why I need to source a drive that's exactly the same so that I can use the HDD controller to try and recover the dat.

the other option is to take the drive apart and to place the discs in another drive, The only problem is that the operation has to be done in a dust free environment and even then I can't guarantee it will work.