The dreaded worst has just happened to me...

My notebook (my primary computer) that I just bought in Sept., now has a HD that won't spin up. It was running fine up until this point. I came home from work today to sit in front of the machine and had a blue screen greet me. It said there was a failure and it was doing a physical memory dump. (If I'm not mistaken, this screen usually pops up for a moment then disappears - but it was just sitting there this time).. When I rebooted, I got a "Operating System Not Found".

The drive will not even spin up now. I tried to power it up in other machines, but it's as if no power is getting to it.

Does anyone know of a data recovery business that doesn't think I have the budget of Boeing? Someone also suggested that I buy an identical drive and swap the board.... eek!

I'm so bumm'd out over this. I just moved all of this data from other machines onto this drive to "secure it" (because the computer is new) until I could back it up. I have a bunch of stuff on there - but the stuff that's upsetting me the most is my wedding photos.... I took 300 over the course of my wedding and honeymoon - all digital. And these companies want to charge me upwards of $1200....

SO STRESSED RIGHT NOW. I thought HD's were supposed to give a warning before they took a dump.

Greetings!

I would not recommend trying to swap the board on a laptop drive. The tolerances are so small that you may do more harm than good. Are there any blatent physical issues? (bent or broken pins, connector problems, tried it in a different machine, etc)

I have never tried a data recovery service before. From the sound of it, they did give you some quotes. What kind of drive was it?

It's a 30GB Toshiba drive that came w. my Sony VAIO. I did try the drive on a PC (w. a 2.5" adapter) and even on the empeg to see if I could hear it spin up. Nada. No spin or even the sound of the motor trying to spin.

I had limited seccond had experience with some data recovery, and the one thing I came away with was that it isn't cheap. There was a large up front fee for them to look at the drive, then a cost per megabyte of data recovered.

Though it seems like you've moved it around a bit, I've found on a couple occasions with failing drives that bumping/shaking them a bit when they won't spin up gets it to work long enough to get the data off.

Matthew

Valid point. Especially if the drive is just jammed. Also, see if the drive is being compressed or if there is any pressure on the bottom of the drive that could be causing drag on the spindle.

How do you spin these things? When I open the drive, will it be abundantly clear? I know enough to NOT expose the platters.

I've never opened the actual drive. I'd just try plugging it in and supplying power, and then gently shake it a bit from side to side. It's not really a scientific process, but just something i've had work before. I have heard of people opening drives up and manually helping the motor start (maybe on this bbs), but by that point you really should have decided that your only other option is throwing the drive in the trash. If you do go that route, make sure you've got it on a non-essential IDE connector, as who knows what it might fry.

Matthew

Sorry, man. That sucks. I was only one step away from your situation about a month ago, and I was looking at data recovery services too. I checked out some company called Disk Doctors or something, because I thought I had heard of them on TechTV. There's a reason they didn't really give their prices over the air. I saw they had an office near me, so I called them up and asked for a quote without shipping. It was something like $400 to $450 just to look at it and get the data off, and then you had to pay for what whatever means you wanted of getting the data back to you, meaning you basically had to buy another hard drive from them.

Luckily, I was able to solve my problem for nothing instead of $600+

I hope you have the same luck. I doubt any companies are going to be cheap by any means.

I had a 40GB Quantum SCSI drive in an old Mac that I had to bang with quite a lot of force onto the desk to get to spin up. I used it in that state as my primary boot drive for about two years. Never lost a single file.

I had a laptop drive that would not spin-up too. I took it apart and freed the stuck head. Put it back together and it worked. I was able to get my data off the drive and I imagine I could have continued to use it however I defiantly did not trust it anymore.

I know everyone is shrieking in horror because I did not wear a space suit in a clean room but it worked and did not cost me $1200.

Be warned this might not work and you will likely loose your warranty.

You actually freed the head?! Wow! I thought you meant spindle at first, but when you mentioned a clean room I figured you meant what you typed! Wow!

Does the "bang the drive" thing work with stuck heads? Or is it more for seized bearings? (One last question): Does the "banging" method only work if you can hear the drive trying to spin up?

Does the "banging" method only work if you can hear the drive trying to spin up?

All the drives I have ever "fixed" by banging them have at least been trying to spin up. I have never had a drive that didn't even try to spin the platters...

Call me a lucky SOB but I tried the "tapping" thing to no avail. Then I got this sudden urge to open the drive and spin the platters by hand!! I gave it a few turns, the closed it up. And it's working now!

Everything is being backed up to a firewire drive at the moment. I REALLY hate this WinXP Home "restore" feature but it will have to do for now. Is Norton Ghost the way to go?

Congratulations!

You are extremely lucky!!! I am glad it worked out for you!

I had the same problem with an old 1G quantum drive. I had to open it up and start up the spindle by hand. I was kinda cool watching the head move back and forth.

Great to hear that you've managed to recover it! That's the one problem about digital photos I've found. It's so easy to accidently do something and make them vanish forever! At least I have to physically destroy both the negatives and prints when using normal film.
Just remember to mount the drive on the wall somewhere as a reminder to make backups

- Trevor

Great to hear that you've managed to recover it! That's the one problem about digital photos I've found. It's so easy to accidently do something and make them vanish forever! At least I have to physically destroy both the negatives and prints when using normal film.
Just remember to mount the drive on the wall somewhere as a reminder to make backups

- Trevor

I'm gonna start a data recovery business I think! $600 to smack a drive off a desk or open it and free the spindle? Easy!

Should be quite lucrative! If it works then you charge them. If it doesn't then you just say "Sorry. It's too knackered"

- Trevor

Thats exactly my thinking. Most companies will pay me rather than do it themselves cos they can't be bothered and its easier to give me the money. I'll also undercut all other data recovery companies.

Zero overheads... a website and a computer. Yes! I can retire before I'm 24!

(nobody else steal my idea)

Edit: I'm seriously considering this actually!

You should market the patented Phillip O'Hare DIY Data Recovery Kit (tm) A nice shrinkwrapped package consisting of a rubber mallet, security Torx bit and a pair of lint free gloves

I think the hardest part of your plan really is to get started. If you can get a few companies to give you a try then word of mouth should keep you going. A flashy professional looking website would be good as well. I've met loads of people that judge a company based on how nice the website looks.

Once you've done a few drives then you can splash out on a copy of a NTFS/FAT32/ext2 undelete utility.

And you've got no competition from me so don't worry

- Trevor

It can't fail ! Yes, potential client's impressiveness varies directly with website flashiness.

One problem I'm having is retreiving my Outlook Contact List and email. I am able to access by "damaged drive" by connecting it to another PC as a D drive. So, my old notebook's main drive is now viewable and browseable as just another drive.

Browsing through, I can't find any .pst file that would have all of this. Does Outlook only create this when you do an Export? How can I find the emails and Contacts?

I believe it only creates a .pst file if you do an export. Also when you do an export you have to select what items you want exported.

It's in \Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME_HERE\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. At least it's there on the version of Outlook I'm using anyway.

Everything should be in the Outlook.pst file unless you've changed it.

- Trevor

It's in \Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME_HERE\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. At least it's there on the version of Outlook I'm using anyway. The Local Settings directory is marked hidden BTW.

Everything should be in the Outlook.pst file unless you've changed it.

- Trevor

If you syncronize your email, the email and contacts will be in .ost file (at least for Outlook 2000). If you do, then you will have to get a third party program to convert it to a .pst file (at least I had to get one to read the contents.)

If you syncronize your email, the email and contacts will be in .ost file (at least for Outlook 2000). If you do, then you will have to get a third party program to convert it to a .pst file (at least I had to get one to read the contents.)

Thanks guys! I was missing that "Local Settings" folder when I was looking for it because it's a hidden folder (and a hidden file after that). I still can't believe I managed to get the data off of this thing!

Weird. It's always been a PST file for me. Even with Outlook 2000.

- Trevor

Weird. It's always been a PST file for me. Even with Outlook 2000.

The .ost file is an Offline folder store. The .pst file is a normal folder store. One is used when your primary storage is on an Exchange server. The other is used if you're using Outlook as a POP3 client.

If you use AutoArchive, you'll probably have both (outlook.ost and archive.pst).

At work (and at home) I always syncronize my email with an exchange server. The syncronization data is in an .ost file. One day the server went nuts, and I couldn't even use my sync data. I tried to open the .ost file as a .pst file, and it didn't work. I looked around and found a couple of programs that is supposed to convert between the two formats.

Ah okay. I don't have Exchange running so I just grab my email with POP3.

- Trevor

Glad it worked for you!

I feel vindicated now since I got a bunch of grief from this board for taking my HD apart in a prior thread . However I also got some great RMA help from this board that was really appreciated.

My hard drive actually had a head crash that kept the patters from moving. The heads were stuck to the platter hard! There was some disk damage so I returned the drive to IBM/Hitachi. I was very careful not to mess up the stickers. I just found out today that a replacement HD was shipped out. Apparently my sticker removal and reattachment was unnoticed.

I believe HD's have the mystic around them that they are unapproachable. Thus the $1200 they want to get one spinning. I imagine that cost may be justified if the HD was melted in a fire or something with only the platter surviving. But $1200 to get it to spin is ridicules.

Glad its going and if I were you I'd try to get an RMA and return it once the data is off.

The price reflects the cost of building and maintaining a clean room.

Rob

Granted clean rooms would cost but it seems to me that after 20 or 30 HD's to pay for the clean room $1200 to spin up a HD would be gravy.

I might look into this....

I have one tiny hole in my sticker where the 7th screw holds the case together. I'm not even going to both sending this thing in for warranty for that reason and one other reason: I am going to frame this hard drive and hang it on my wall to remind me to always backup my data!

Luckily, I have a 48GB IBM Travelstar that I just pulled from my empeg a few months ago - that's going into the notebook now.

Thank you everyone for your support. Reading your posts let me approach this in a "the worst hasn't happened... yet" attitude.