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Hi Guys

Wonder if any of you can suggest something I have missed.

My Daughter’s HDD has died, and yes, of course she does not have a recent backup - how many times have I seen this?

I have tried all my usual tricks to get a the data but so far failed.

I have tries to read from Hirens boot disk using Linux and windows XP. Also tried the overnight in the freezer trick. I am pretty sure that I can declare this as a dead drive RIP and she will with any luck learn her lesson.

Any useful ideas would be gratefully received.

ps

Whilst writing it seems to me that HDDs built in the past couple of years die far more suddenly than they used to. I used to see tell-tale signs of drives dying and therefore take measures to replace them, now days they seem to simply drop dead with no warning.

5 Spice ups
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The freezer trick is my go to option for this.

Does the drive still spin up at all? If so, you could potentially replace the board on the bottom of the drive (where the SATA port is), which may make it readable again.

But it may be even better to let her learn this as a lesson in backups.

1 Spice up
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Sorry I can’t help you with the HD, you already did everything I would have done. You could call Kroll, at least you could tell her how much it would cost to recover the data. Look on the bright side, it’s nice to know your kid is normal.

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You say she’s “normal” - you haven’t even met her! …

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It all depends on what (where?) the damage is. If the head is gone, there is pretty much nothing you can do. If some sectors on the plates are getting bad, you still have a chance to recover some data from it. If the board is faulty, you can try and replace it (but it has to be exactly the same model).

Personally, I haven’t noticed any difference between new and old drives. And a hard drive installed in a laptop, obviously does not get the same mechanical stress as a hard drive installed in a desktop computer.

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I have also noticed the “sudden” death syndrome. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that the electronics on the drives have improved. After 3 tries, a bad read used to be passed to the controller/driver/OS. Now, the drive remaps bad sectors on the fly. If the number of bad sectors starts to increase rapidly, the drive conceals that until the failure reaches the catastrophic point. SMART drives tend to give you some warning as they detect more errors. But I’ve never seen a consumer-level system that monitored SMART in a visible way.

1 Spice up
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I just meant as far as backing things up. I have two college aged daughters myself, they’ve never backup a thing in their life.

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Spinrite may eek a bit of life out of the device.

Long term, do need an automagical option for backup, such as Crashplan or similar avenue.

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Are you getting a clicking sound coming from the drive when you plug it in?

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Yep - the famous click of death.

The partitions are recognisable when plugged in as a guest HDD but windows says they are not readably and need formatting.

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ddrescue and testdisk are my go-to tools for this type of thing. Image the bad drive to a working drive using ddrescue, use testdisk to repair/recover partitions.

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I think ddrescue is worth a shot. If the system can see partitions, there might be a chance. Since you can’t clone the disk you’ll have to work from the original. Try that before anything else. An have a system you can dedicate to it. It will most likely take a few days, but if the data is worth it to you, then it’s worth trying.

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DDRescue has saved someone’s bacon

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Awesome- glad to hear it worked for you- ddrescue has saved LOTS of bacon over the years!