Hard Drive Recovery Tools

Sometimes it's only the motor that doesn't start. I "saved" HD's by taking 'em out, and with the cables still attached, spin/wiggle 'em horizontally like you would start an old mechanical clock. Of course when you get it spinning, make a back up IMMEDIATLY, 'cause this might not work a second time.
I also had good results with deepfreezing a broken HD. Put it in a ziplock bag and freeze it. After a few hours in the deep freezer, take it out of the bag, quickly connect it and if it works : BACKUP IMMEDIATLY !!!
Of course these methods are NOT GUARANTEED to work, but it might be worth a try...
Success !

Yes. Once had to send my hard drive to a recovery service. There was an agonizing rattle and scraping sound then the blue screen of death. Local computer person could not get the drive to work. unfortunately, the hard drive was not backed up. The cost for recovery was approximately $1200. All files were recovered! I now backup routinely.

Just wanted to put a plug in for SpinRite (www.grc.com). Altho' it costs $89+, I have recovered half a dozen system HDDs on PCs (four were Dells) that expired with HDD error shortly after their 90 day or 1 yr warranty expired.

Over the past 5 yrs, I've become a "true believer" in the capabilities of SpinRite. It's definitely worth a mention in any of your articles on HDD recovery and/or repair.

(Assuming that life would actually go on if the entire contents of the drive were lost forever) When it is a last resort, why not invest ten bucks in a precision Torx driver set and take the drive apart yourself? I happen to have a good source of used computers and used components, I could buy a working model of the same hard drive that failed, remove the disks from the failed drive and put them in the working drive. No clean room? big deal, I only need it to work for one read, who cares about a micro-speck? I might even lose one file to the dust, although I doubt it. Even if the effort failed utterly, it would be a great experience, and imagine your pride if it succeeded.

I am thinking of HDD recovery problem in the knowledge of time before 2000 and it still works for me even today with these terabyte HDDs. “Blue screen of death” means in most of the practical cases crash of the operational system but not physical death of the device. Most of the HDD die from bad clusters located in the boot area. I don’t mean comparatively rare cases when HDD is physically dead as electronic device and recovery takes very expensive and specialized lab job.
What do I do in case of “blue screen of death” at your monitor? You could turn off the computer from wall outlet, open the tower and gently remove (unscrew and unplug HDD). There is always a map drawn on the HDD showing position (s) of small jumper (s) determining how your drive should work: as a slave (just external memory source) or as master (bootable device loading up operational system). Many HDDs are connected automatically depending on how you connect your device to the system and it should be shown on this map (in the table) too. You open your other computer or computer of your friend and plug damaged HDD as slave to the other computer getting access to the content of crashed HDD. You can get such access in the most of the cases excluding comparatively rare cases of massive damage of the boot sector. The other questions are simple and depend on software downloadable for free from Internet and basic knowledge of the MS Windows interface. I mean that you should know where is your valuable mail (location - folders) and My documents with the most frequently saved data. After the recovery you could try to reformat HDD (build new partitions with distributive of your Windows) and if the damage of your HDD is not crucial you can in many cases use such HDD as master (bootable drive) again or you could try to use it as extra space to store your files on the HDD working in slave mode. Modern HDDs are huge survivors much better than kitchen electric stove. :)

I also used spinrite and it recovered almost all the problematic HD, I used it in my friends HD, cause mine are backuped daily and some files are even backuped hourly.

i don't think recovery softwares can recover video files . i have tried my recovery software but they always give me corrupted video files even " divxfix++" cannot repair recovered video file .

If you have the time, Scott Moulton has a series of videos on YouTube that cover this topic. *Very* interesting, and informative.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SuperFlyFlippingA

ditto spinrite. it actually fixes bad spots on the disk. I've recovered many disks with it and run it yearly as proactive prevention. $89, but it's yours to use anywhere anytime as often as desired. some of the best money i've ever spent on software.

Hello Mr. Rankin!

I'm in great trouble and I need your HELP badly sir. Here's the story. My boss asked me to back up all the files on Drive C to Drive D, then I thought it would take long before its done. So I've decided to make a Clone of drive C: using another software. Then after a few minutes its done. I looked into drive D: for my old files and I was shocked because my files were gone! What exactly happened back there??? I'm in deep trouble and might get fired. Save me please Mr. Rankin. How can I restore the Files that accidentally deleted? Is there any way I can get them back?? thanks. I'm hoping for your reply sir. Thanks.

EDITOR'S NOTE: These may help:

http://askbobrankin.com/recover_deleted_files.html

http://askbobrankin.com/recover_deleted_files_free.html