[scottportraits]

Aug 8, 2007

Hello,

My 250 GB hard drive (Western Digital Caviar) is no longer working....must have sustained some shock or damage. Will not be recognized or made accessible by PC....I have tried several things, they all say the thing is broke, end of story.

How does one go about salvaging some or all of the data on such a 'dead' hard drive ??

Thanks,

Scottportraits

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If its a mechanical failure (which it sounds like it is), its a no-go situation short of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars in a professional lab under strict dust-free environment with no guarantees and no indication of amount of time.

If the drive is not showing on the BIOS Post screen, its almost always a mechanical failure (assuming the obvious has been checked such as jumper settings, cable connections and power cable connections).

[Neil Jones]

If its a mechanical failure (which it sounds like it is), its a no-go situation short of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars in a professional lab under strict dust-free environment with no guarantees and no indication of amount of time.

If the drive is not showing on the BIOS Post screen, its almost always a mechanical failure (assuming the obvious has been checked such as jumper settings, cable connections and power cable connections).

[scottportraits]

August 12

Yes, all the obvious things were checked....

But when it was in the slave bay inside the PC, although it wouldn't show under 'My Computer' or allow access of any files, I did notice it when I ran the Belarc advisor.

It showed as drive 0 and was called WD250-_____, but thats the only evidence I have of it even being recognized. I can't imagine why it would cost so much to fix one of these things....or where such a lab is to be found, but one thing I learned is this:

Don't handle these hard drives while they are still hot or warm. You gotta let 'em cool off completely. That's the only 'rough treatment' this one got, being moved from one place to another and back again, without a cool-down period.
Also, it seems the bigger they get, 250GB, 360GB, 500GB the more delicate they are and more prone to getting broken by just handling them while they are still warm.

It's a tragedy of immense proportion, so heed my word on this. I know now from experience and a broken heart.

-scottportraits

[Troy]

It's a tragedy of immense proportion, so heed my word on this. I know now from experience and a broken heart.

Yes it is, join the club Make sure you have backups! Backups! And then backups of your backups! I also learnt this the hard way

[Seltox]

Hard Drive problems suck really bad. I'm in the middle of one right now, thankfully it just causes my OS to not work after a day or 2 even after a complete deleting/recreating partitions and formatting and stuff. I was able to plug it into a slave drive and access it.

So, i've learnt that backups are good, but not the "hard" way. More the soft way i guess.

[Troy]

Lucky you!