HDD Recovery??

[Dominico]

Hi all

My Dell XPS recently crashed overnight and is now out of action, a Dell technician visited me and deemed the hard drive to be the source of the problem.

hard drive is a Western Digital WD2500

I cannot run my computer with this hard drive in however have lots of valuable data and information on it that i would like to recover.

Does anyone know how i could possibly do this??
all suggestions welcome thanks guys

 

[Committed]

I've had a couple hard drive crashes in the past and what I did was put them in the freezer for a few minutes and then reconnected them and they booted right up. Was able to get all my data off. One on a laptop kept working for another month or so after a trip to the freezer. I was given this tip from my super computer geek bud.

 

[Dominico]

Hi Thanks but i am a bit hesitant at putting it in the freezer because condensation will surely build up in the hard drive and make it worse n??

 

[Committed]

If you're already crashed it's worth the try. I didn't have any problems with condensation but I didn't leave it in too long. Worked for me twice and I know it has worked for others.

 

[Aastii]

Don't do the freezer thing until this, because of, as you say, condensation risk.

If you have another computer or know someone with a computer that you could borrow for 1 boot up then put the HDD in as a slave, see if you can access it. If you can, back it all up onto the other HDD or another storage device, then wipe it knowing you have it all safe. If you can't even see it when it's a slave then there is no hope for it on the current set up so no matter how hard you try, you aint getting nothing out of it, so may aswell either try the freezer thing or just wipe it and start again and learn from it by backing up important stuff often. You could buy an external hard drive, they cost about £100 for a 1TB one, you can probably find cheaper from amazon or something, so they aren't that expensive.

 

[EricH]

I've used a "Live-CD" for this purpose, along with a thumb drive or external USB HD to transfer files from a non-bootable drive.
For live cd's, Knoppix has worked great for me.

 

[Aastii]

I've used a "Live-CD" for this purpose, along with a thumb drive or external USB HD to transfer files from a non-bootable drive.
For live cd's, Knoppix has worked great for me.

I fail to see how this will help now XD

good advice for storage later on but not too good for saving the drive, i aggree that an external HDD or discs are good storage options, external HDD would be better because it is more compact and cheaper for the same amount of storage. I dread to think how much 1TB or even 500GB in cds would cost