Hi everybody,
I recently had my Hard disk falling down on the floor (It is a 200GB WD, connected to my computer through USB using an outer box). When I turn it on I hear a clicking sound and it probably has a kind of mechanical failure - a broken head perhaps. After a while the sound stops and I can see the drive in the device manager (although it says that there are no drivers installed for this device), but i cannot see the drive in the windows explorer or thrgough any other program, so i cannot access the drive.
Is there any way to recover the data from the drive without sending it to a company for data recovery? Is the solution of putting it in the refrigerator acceptable?
I have tried to connect the drive as a secondary drive in my midi-tower, but the same thing occurs)
what about utilities? can any utility like HDD regenerator work, although the hard disk is not recognised by the windows?
and about the "freezing solution", is it better to put it in the fridge or in the fridger? Isn't there any danger in the latter case for the ice particles to become water and destroy further the drive?
Is the freezer trick workable on mechanical failure, like a head, as opposed to a problem in the logic board?
No it's not really applicable to mechanical failure. As you implied, the freezer trick is more for logic board type failures where some failing IC's might just work a little bit longer if the temperature is reduced. I dont think it's likely to do anything for mechanical failure or head crash. Personally I've never had much success with the freezer trick for any type of drive failure.
I Have the exact same problem, I dropped the 300GB exturnal hard drive and now it just makes a clicking noise before turning itself off after a few minuites. Could you tell me if the fridge trick worked? or if you sent it away?
Think is i was reseting my computer so the data was just stored on the extural drive. not in the 2 places as normal, if anyone has any ideas i would be most appriciattive, cheers, Dan
The freezer trick probably won't work for that sort of damage; the heads are probably out of alignment. Any attempt to use the drive will probably make it worse.
If you need that data I'd be sending the drive off, but expect it to be a cleanroom job (couple of thousand dollars minimum).
woow, thats alot, thanks very much for letting us know, cheers, Dan. so would you just use yellow pages to find a computer shop or use one of those big companies that speciallise in those sorts of things
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Originally Posted by Shinma
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