This is the first time I've ever had to turn to the community for help... but I'm desperate.

My hard disk sort of died today. It's been grinding down for ever, and it eventually kicked it in this morning.

It's a 10gb drive sitting in an old IBM PC300GL I use for misc stuff - sometimes for the server, or to do misc jobs like encryption cracking, or whatever.

Anyway, it's not so much the drive itself which is important - I could buy a replacement one for probobly under $10 - but having the data which I had stored on it is a matter of life or death. I'm too stupid to make regular backups, so there's about three months of work stored on there which I now can't get to, and which I didn't backup anywhere else - stupidly.

I've tried just about everything that I know of to try and revive it - freezing it, running a hair-dryer over it, dropping it from about a foot, whacking the crap out of it with the butt of a screwdriver, and a few other weird but useful methods for resurecting drives I've picked up along the way - but it still isn't working.

Any more suggestions, anyone? Basically, if I can't recover what I had stored on there, I might as well go and put some concrete boots on lay-by down at the local market. It really is that important.

What happens when I try and get it to spin up is... absolutely nothing. The little light flashes as normal, but the motors don't kick in. It sounds like they start to churn, but then sort of give up after a second or two. Sometimes, the motors will try and start - but then it sounds like the arm that supports the head-readers are just flicking back and forth very fast, making a loud whirring sort of a sound. I've been having this problem for a while whenever I've turned the beast off and then gone to turn it back on, but usually it comes to life after flicking the power switch a few times.

I am in desperate need of help here. And I can't afford to send it away to a data-recovery specialist, so don't suggest that.

 

 

 

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Take another harddisk to your friends place and connct it as a secondary master. It should allow the pc to start normally. then you may go for recovery tools available in the downloads sites and recover it. but I don't think software methods would help much. and even they do help, you got to have something else to boot from..

This is all I can suggest. My second suggestion is banned from you, which is propably, take it to a speacialist.

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It's not the actual computer; just the drive. I've got like 30 boxes lying around my place, so hooking it up to a second box as a slave and ghosting it wouldn't be a problem, if the drive actually worked. Which it doesn't. So I think I'm pretty screwed.

I'm too poor to fork out hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to get the data recovered from it by some specialist.

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You probably spoilt the disk with all that.

Basically from what I read from your post is that it is a hardware failure. The motors don't kick in. This usually means that the hard disk is getting old or something. However, the data inside is usually safe.

You could try something like this, but its extremely risky and i shall not take any responsibility whatsoever....

You could buy the exact same hard disk. So now the new hard disk we shall call it A and the one that died down on you B. You can try to open B up and take out the discs and placing them in B, exactly where it should be.

This is just a suggestion, and I think you should understand what I mean. Anyway, its really risky...

 

 

 

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No... if a physical disk is on its last legs, then you can generally bring it back to life for at least long enough to get the data off of it in the strangest of ways. Trust me, I've been doing it for years. Dropping it from about 10 inches, heating it up, spinning it around a few times on a flat surface - sounds strange, but it does often work. I think the problem is that some bearings have either become stuck, or worn down beyond the point of use - so by trying to shift them round (eg. by jarring the disk) could possibly breath life back into it again.

I am aware that it's a hardware failure. And I said that the disk was 10gb, which sort of suggests that it is relatively old. And considering it stays grinding away pretty much around the clock, it has had some serious use.

I would most definately not risk opening the disk - a single speck of dust on those layers can completely destroy it all. And it would be next to impossible to remove and replace them in a standard home/office environment witout a little dust being involved.

The data inside would be safe - but I'm still not willing to risk 'transplanting' the discs. It's just too risky, as you said.

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