Wife's work computer died, (xp home) their computer guys would just tear it apart or toss it in a corner and send her a new one, so i took out her hard drive (seagate 40gb barracuda 7200.7) and used a sata to usb device to hook it up to my pc (xp pro on my pc) to attempt to grab some data for her from it, sadly it seems the hard drive was the problem as it isn't even showing up (it does spin up and doesn't make any horrible noises).

Whenever i hook it up via usb and try to go to my computer it just stalls out (never shows the list of drives) also tried right click on my computer then management and discs (to see it that way) again same thing if its not plugged in i can get in there fine, once it is plugged in the disc management screen just stalls (says "not responding" after a few mins) yet the moment i turn it off or unplug the usb the my computer or disc management pages load fine.

I also downloaded seagates windows seatools program, took a few times of restarting it but finally saw the drive, i tried the smart test (says unavailable), the only one that ran was the long generic and there were 2 options (one to create a log of errors and one to repair them) I figured heck why not do the repair one see if anything works afterwords its running right now 83 errors so far...

(this is the info from the seatools help file about the long generic test using repair option)
"Long Generic" will run on internal and external drives. It scans the entire drive, from beginning to end. This test may take several hours to complete. You may abort the test at any time. The test will fail and end if a bad sector is detected on an internal drive.

In the case of USB external drives, the "Long Generic" test has the option to Repair sectors. For more information on this subject, see the topic below "Bad Sector Found" in section 4. If you choose Repair None, the "Long Generic" test will scan the entire drive and simply list any unreadable sectors in the log file.

Data is stored in sectors and each sector has 512 bytes. The "Long Generic" test with USB sector Repair enabled will only repair individual sectors as needed. When a 512-byte sector is unreadable, any data that might have been in that sector is already lost. When a drive has a large amount of free space, odds are in favor of an unreadable sector being empty and not in use. If you choose Repair All, the "Long Generic" test will scan the entire drive after pressing the F8 key and attempt to repair unreadable sectors. If a sector cannot be repaired, then the test will fail and end. See the log file for a listing of any unreadable sectors.


Hopefully choosing that repair option wasn't totally dumb but at this point I didn't know what else to try or do...

I also tried the "freeze it" method, putting it in a ziplock in the freezer for a few hrs still same results (this did work on a laptop hard drive we had go bad once in the past) but no luck on this one.

She has days of work forms pictures etc on there, heck I bought her a 16 gb flashdrive a while back ago but she only put a few things on it before this happened.

I know this will teach her a lesson (to back stuff up) yet I would love to help her recover anything if possible on this without having to send it to some expensive data recovery company.

Anything else i can try or do before just dumping it?

Bill

Hmm, it seems to me that you've done all the proper research and all that I would've recommended to you. How did the repair method go? Didn't work? I guess the final thing you can do is probably do a platter-transfer to recover the files. You will probably have to pay for it and back in Malaysia it was pretty costly even though they gave a discount if it's for personal data.

Maybe if you google online you can find instructions on doing a platter-transfer recovery, and since you're already planning on dumping it maybe you can just give it a shot?

I hope you manage to save the files in the end though. I just faced such an ordeal a few months ago and I lost loads of personal files... That was terribly painful...

I also tried the "freeze it" method, putting it in a ziplock in the freezer

That was a mistake and I never recommend it except as a last resort. This very, very old trick rarely works, and often causes the hard grease in the bearings to crack, fall out of place, then become ineffective when warm. In any event, the freezer trick is for seized bearings - your comment that the drive does spin up indicates the bearings were not seized.

I don't like running diagnostics on a hard drive through USB - In fact I don't like USB at all and wish 3.0 would hurry up. Do other SATA drives connected to your XP Pro system in this manner work fine? If your XP computer uses internal SATA drives now, then the necessary 3rd party drivers are already installed so I would attempt to connect the drive that way, then run diagnostics on it, and attempt to retrieve any critical data.

The danger of a damaged disk that cannot be repaired by a normal user is the data left on it. Depending on the value to you, or the sensitivity of the data to you or the company, the expensive "forensic" recovery techniques Kaistar suggested may or may not make recovery economically feasible. But a badguy, should he get possession of the drive may have the tools and time. Disposal of a broken drive is tricky.

I let the seatools long generic test run overnight, it found over 6,000 errors (bar was at around 30%) and then it stopped saying FAILED.

I will pull my internal storage sata drive out put this in and see if it helps to run the test while connected directly (vs usb), who knows but it's worth a try it might even show up in bios or my computer or disk management by being connected internally vs thru usb.

Other usb connected eide and sata drives do work for me, but heck at this point I am just tryin anything i can to help her recover stuff, worst case its gone (she doesn't want to spend hundreds on having a company try to recover the data) but if nothing else hopefully she will start using that flash drive i got her now.

Bill

Oh gosh I missed out the fact that you were connecting through it through USB...

Since I run my own site now, these days I keep a backup copy of my files online just to be safe. I'm not too sure if using filehosting as a backup server is a good idea, but it's something I'm trying.

Out of curiosity though, what caused the computer to die off?

Not sure she said it was fine when she left (they leave their computers on 24/7 as the main office updates things at night sometimes), came in to a frozen screen attempted to reboot and it wouldn't restart, i wasnt sure what was wrong in the pc but i was hoping it was MB or something else (and that i could pull data off the HD) her work wanted her to box and send it in that day, so i pulled the drive here first knowing if she sent it in she'd have ZERO chance of getting her data back.

I will report back once i hook it up direct sata line to MB and see what if anything i can do see or repair thru that seatools or my computer or disk management etc.

Thanks again for everyone's input
Bill

I let the seatools long generic test run overnight, it found over 6,000 errors (bar was at around 30%) and then it stopped saying FAILED.

If you got it to run that far I think retesting with a direct SATA connection will show similar results. But if you want to try, go for it. Just make sure you unplug the computer from the wall, and discharge any static to bare metal of the case before reaching in.

Hooked it up direct sata to mb, ran the same seagate seatools tests etc not seeming to do much of anything acting same as thru the usb method.

Tried also going in thru my computer and disk management - sorta stalls out the application (not responding message after 30 or so seconds), so at this point I think I am done trying to recover anything on it and time to let her know the bad news and remind her to start using that flashdrive I gave her a while back ago.

Bill

Oh bummer. Sad to hear that nothing can be done about it...

Yeah, backups can save the day. The best use for an old computer, IMO, is as a network storage device for backup. One of the backup schemes the wife and I use frequently is to drag and drop our My Documents folder to the networked drive. With the data on our drives worth much more than all the hardware in the house, this brings peace of mind knowing a recent backup is always nearby.