Advice needed hardware failure

hmm, I know the ONLY way this thread will be considered anything to do with SL is that I have 200GB of data, texture files etc.. Now
My prob is this, I purchased a external "maxtor" HD 320GB have been using it to store my data for about a year, templates and such... photoshop brushes, animation files and various music and personal files...
SO today... I plug it into USB... hardware failure... blah blah.. SHOOT (ok thats NOT what I said) anyway, I have gone as advised from persons and reading up and purchased another external casing.. all the other HD I thought were dead but hung onto anyway worked brilliantly, as a matter of fact I recovered about 200GB music that I spent a week putting on a HD.. anyhow... this one particualr marked segate drive wont recognize.... Nothing blah .... CRAP, now there are at least 100GB on this HD I can NOT ever find again... stupid me thinking an external was a good idea to backup my files!! Anyhow I am faced with the need to recover many of these files I need them! I can not replace them including the last digital photos of my nephew who died when he was 17!

BTW: the HD itself seems to be making a clicking sound.. like the platter is not spinning or something... I dunno..


Why I post is do any of you have any experience with data recovery services, who are the best how much does it generally cost and any advice on this you can offer.

I simply will break down and have a mental breakdown if I can not get some of these files back....
Thank you very much for any assistance you can offer.

& yes I have wrote a few e mails to services and await their responses, but considering the weekend... I know there is one data recovery place very close to me, data analyzers however since I have never been as stupid with this as I am right now I had always backed up to a CD or dvd.. I have no idea what to expect.

That clicking sound is called "thrashing".. it's the read/write arm going into a bit of a digital seizure and smacking back against the stop position guard.. not supposed to do that obviously. Usually thrashing comes on fairly slowly but increases in frequency and severity the more you use it. It is *always* the sign that the drive is failing. You may be able to get access to it if the problem is recent and not terminal, by trying to power it off and on, attempting access it.. if not power down and try again.. try a bunch of times. Sometimes if they're not gone, you can access them between their little fits just long enough to get your data off of them (I've done it several times).
Barring that, the process of data recovery involves removing the platters from it, and transplanting them into a like unit, or into a master reader designed for the purpose. It's very expensive to have done and they cannot guarantee the recovery of anything. Usually with this type of problem though the results are nearly 100% unless they screw up badly.

Edit to add that usually it only the data stored near the beginning, or immediate center of the drive that would get scrambled.. if it does at all.

Things to expect:

It will not be cheap. But it is probably worth it to recover data that can never be created again.

Unless your hard drive platter(s) are severely damaged by a crashed head, there's no reason not to expect you'll get all of your data back, intact. You will probably get back a lot of old, deleted data as well.

There is a company called DriveSavers, that can take the drive apart in a clean-room, extract the data platters, transplant them into a working drive, and recover the data in most cases.

BUT, it doesn't come cheap. On the order of several hundred dollars, last time I looked.

Thank you as always, Your insight and helpfulness is appreciated,. I shall give a call to a few companies tomorrow datasavers being the first..

I have tried powering on off several times... to many to count to be honest.. I have however refrained from throwing it across the room and drowing my sorrows in a bottle of Absolut vodka..... (still an option I believe) Maybe that several hundred dollars wont hurt so bad...


My thanks to you all.

If you find one that runs in the hundreds, you have found a cheap one.

In similar circumstances, as a last resort having seen it suggested somewhere, I put the drive in my freezer (not the fridge, the ice box I think you call it) overnight and then used one of the free data retrieval utilities you can find on the net - and got most of my stuff back.

Pep (I'm sure there's a rationale, but if it works do you have to worry about understanding the physics?)

When I had a drive fail about three years ago, a company called USitek saved my life. They were able to recover 100% of my data. The cost was around $200. Give them a call, and ask for Zack.

http://usitek.com/contact_us.htm

The lesson I learned was never again to put anything important on just one drive. I now use two physical disks on a RAID mirror as my data drive, so everything exists in duplicate at all times. I also sync to an external backup drive about once a week.

I've been doing it that way for the past three years, ever since that first failure. And it's a damned good thing I've got that mirror, because I had another drive die just three or four weeks ago. All I had to do was swap it out for a new one, rebuild the array, and presto, all my stuff was there.

I strongly recommend everyone do this. RAID mirrors are worth 10 times their weight in gold. If your hardware doesn't support RAID 1, invest in hardware that does. I won't do ANYTHING without a mirror in place anymore. (Note, RAID 5 is also a great way to go, but it requires more disks than RAID 1.)

I do hope this ends well for you, but as others have said, it will not be cheap.

I have had to help others recover their computers after similar problems, and in that context I would just like to point out the difference between a "back-up" and an archive. It is a good idea to back up your data...that is make a copy tom a different media than the original, and leave the original in place. Moving it to an archive on a separate drive doesn't really back up the information...you still have just one copy.

There are several options that you can consider to prevent this from happening again. A duplicate copy to an external drive is a good basic backup. For more protection against data lose, a RAID array using RAID 1 or RAID 5 are good for general backups. A typical RAID 1 array uses 2 discs, with each offering an exact copy of the other. If a drive fails, you replace it and rebuild the array with a new drive. RAID 5 writes data over 3 or more drives in a way that the failure of any single drive will not cause any lose of data. It gives more usable space than a RAID 1 array (since everything is duplicated in RAID 1, you lose half the available space: on RAID 5 you lose the space of one disc in the array, so overhead goes down as the number of discs increases).

The other option is backing up to optical media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray). With blu-ray burners going down in price and having a capacity of 50 GB per dual-layer disc, it is becoming an attractive option. The biggest flaw is media degradation...the optical layer oxidizes over time, leading to lost data. Long-term storage requires copying the media on a regular basis, which is determined by the quality of the media. High-quality CD-Rs have been rated by the manufacturers as laostin 100 years, but I would expect to make a copy at least every 10. Rewritable media is the worst for long-term storage, as the writable layer is not nearly as stable as on write-once media.

Before spending $$$ on a data recovery company, try this: Freeze your drive.

Put the thing in your freezer, in a plastic bag. Let it chill down overnight. Take it out, hook it up, and see if it works. If it does, copy off your data before it heats up and seizes again.

Lindal yet again demonstrates how dumb you can look wasting time if you have people on ignore.

Pep (Or maybe she just doesn't read anyone else's posts. )