opinions after HDD failure

[lebdorz]

Hello

So I got my hard drive to be in a failure and misfunctioning mode

I tried everything and when attached it to external enclosure, I can see the drives C and D where C has windows 7 ultimate installed on and D is for data saving

none of the drives are opening, the C: says it needs format and D: says it is empty lol

Took it to a professional company and they said they can retrieve my data only in one case if I get them a similar hard drive with same specs which is seagate 500GB they will replace the board of the hdd, and possibility of having my files back is 90% ... and it will cost me 120$ and around 60$ for hard drive if found

what do u think guys"??
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BTW: when attached it externally, I opend device mngr and could see that the drive is RAW
Do u think if I try to convert the drives from RAW to NTFS back, would it work and I get my files back? Using TestDisk ??

 

[GokAy]

Download Partition Wizard free and start its Partition Recovery Wizard, select disk and perform a quick scan. When finished take a screenshot, then double click the partitions and take screenshots again.

Attach them here - http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html

 

[Bernardus]

You could do that yourself, if you could find an identical one.
But any real professional recovery firm would be able, without another replacement drive or board, to read out your HD disc
They take out the bare disc. on a special spindle in a dust free lab.
The point is, that you could make a backup or clone with that info, that could be restored or copied to/ on another drive. Any similar or larger one.
I've done that more often. The activations would also work on most programs.

 

[lebdorz]

Download Partition Wizard free and start its Partition Recovery Wizard, select disk and perform a quick scan. When finished take a screenshot, then double click the partitions and take screenshots again.

Attach them here - http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html

can this program scan or recover the drives even though they r asking me to format and the other one is empty??

You could do that yourself, if you could find an identical one.
But any real professional recovery firm would be able, without another replacement drive or board, to read out your HD disc
They take out the bare disc. on a special spindle in a dust free lab.
The point is, that you could make a backup or clone with that info, that could be restored or copied to/ on another drive. Any similar or larger one.
I've done that more often. The activations would also work on most programs.

Thanks, so I can get a Western Digital Hard drive and replace the board with my faulty seagate??

 

[GokAy]

That program can help recover partitions but don't attempt it yourself if data is important, just take the screenshots and cancel out of the wizard. There are couple other programs that can help recovery too. Anyway, post the screenshots when done please.

 

[Bernardus]

If you could find an exactly same type HD. you could easily transfer the board.
There are companies, that send you the right type of pc board, if you have the proper information.
Even if not successful, you could still go tot t a special company.
They can read out a damaged drive even after a fire.
They only need the bare disc. which is very well protected.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Frankly, I feel any company that requires you to get a donor drive instead of them getting a replacement PCB is not what I would call professional. A professional company would have the resources needed to acquire a PCB (if they didn't already have one on hand). If you got the wrong PCB (there are subtle differences even when they look alike, even within the same part number of the HDD), you could lose what data you have.

One caution about trying to recover the data yourself. It's possible that any attempts to recover data yourself could actually cause you to lose any data that is still on the drive. It would be much safer to send the drive to some real data recovery professionals. However, those guys are seriously expensive; easily well north of $1k with no guarantees of success. You have to decide how much the data on that drive is worth to you. If you can't or aren't willing to spend that much and would rather lose the data, then home repair attempts might be worthwhile.

Since all drives will eventually fail, in the future, you need to maintain at least two backups of any data you have—one onsite and one offsite—to reasonably ensure you won't ever lose your data again. Backup drives should never be connected to your computer except when updating the backup. An easy and comparatively inexpensive way to maintain an onsite and offsite backup is to use an external HDD for the onsite backup kept in a drawer someplace at home and connect it to the computer when updating a backup (which should be done frequently) and using a good paid cloud backup service (not a cloud storage site, especially the free ones!), such as Carbonite.com, CrashPlan, or Backblaze, for your off site backup. Any of those will cost around $60/year. If keeping backups seems too expensive or time consuming, ask yourself how much they cost and how much time you would spend v.s. $1k+ for professional data recovery with no guarantees of success.

I may sound harsh but I've seen your scenario all too many times and it is completely unnecessary if people would just backup their data.

 

[Nedly]

Frankly, I feel any company that requires you to get a donor drive instead of them getting a replacement PCB is not what I would call professional. A professional company would have the resources needed to acquire a PCB (if they didn't already have one on hand). If you got the wrong PCB (there are subtle differences even when they look alike, even within the same part number of the HDD), you could lose what data you have.

One caution about trying to recover the data yourself. It's possible that any attempts to recover data yourself could actually cause you to lose any data that is still on the drive. It would be much safer to send the drive to some real data recovery professionals. However, those guys are seriously expensive; easily well north of $1k with no guarantees of success. You have to decide how much the data on that drive is worth to you. If you can't or aren't willing to spend that much and would rather lose the data, then home repair attempts might be worthwhile.

Since all drives will eventually fail, in the future, you need to maintain at least two backups of any data you have—one onsite and one offsite—to reasonably ensure you won't ever lose your data again. Backup drives should never be connected to your computer except when updating the backup. An easy and comparatively inexpensive way to maintain an onsite and offsite backup is to use an external HDD for the onsite backup kept in a drawer someplace at home and connect it to the computer when updating a backup (which should be done frequently) and using a good paid cloud backup service (not a cloud storage site, especially the free ones!), such as Carbonite.com, CrashPlan, or Backblaze, for your off site backup. Any of those will cost around $60/year. If keeping backups seems too expensive or time consuming, ask yourself how much they cost and how much time you would spend v.s. $1k+ for professional data recovery with no guarantees of success.

I may sound harsh but I've seen your scenario all too many times and it is completely unnecessary if people would just backup their data.

I agree with your post entirely. Though, you could make a disk image and perform your own recovery on the image and leave the drive aside. Needing a donor drive never made sense to me either, unless they were actually switching parts. I always keep three copies of my data - 2nd copy in case the first crashes, and a third in the soil in case zombies.

 

[LMiller7]

But any real professional recovery firm would be able, without another replacement drive or board, to read out your HD disc
They take out the bare disc. on a special spindle in a dust free lab.

That is one of the most advanced, difficult, and expensive procedures available to a data recovery professional and is usually used only as a last resort. Replacement of the circuit board is by comparison a simple procedure. Procedures that involve opening the drive are used only when necessary.

Any professional data recovery company would themselves obtain the donor hard drive. Other than the drive model there are a number of other things that must match. Exactly which things varies depending on the specific drive. No professional would trust this to an amateur who would likely as not get it wrong. Unfortunately there are some companies that quote bargain prices that are not at all professional. They are best avoided. Real professional data recovery is expensive.

 

[Nedly]

I am not sure why everyone assumes sending it to some replacement facility is even necessary seems as so the disk seems to be functional. This is only needed when something actually goes bad - which we do not know for sure yet. I personally would use a live system to check the drives functionality/condition, make a disk image, recover my files from the disk image, then reformat the original drive, place files back on it.

If there is perhaps some physical error on the board or internal parts, you are looking at either thousands of dollars for repair, or you can cut your losses and buy a kit for 300$ to try to do it yourself. Options are options, and they do have weight on a scale, it is up to you whether it is worth it to try and do it yourself or try to send it away - and either option should not be considered until you know for sure there is a hardware problem and not a data problem.

Not only that, but did the drive work before using the enclosure? Some enclosures are not the most compatible... + the original post states that it is viewed as RAW in Disk Manager, which is a decent indication that the drive is communicating with the system.

I would also be curious about the enclosure. Some require formats, specific file systems, some are not plug and play, and some are platform specific. Some even require drivers for proper functionality.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

The reason for using professional data recovery experts first is amateur efforts could accidentally destroy data that may have been otherwise recovered, albeit at great expense. Once a drive starts showing problems the safest thing to do is leave it alone and get to someone who knows what they are doing ASAP (and, from what the OP told us about the outfit he did take the drive to, that outfit does NOT know what they are doing). The owner of the data needing recovery needs to decide if the data is worth the expense that will be incurred, with no guarantees of success, or if it would be better to accept that the data is probably lost anyway and only then try to recover the data on the owner's own. The only way to reasonably ensure that one's data will never be lost (barring highly unlikely scenarios such as an asteroid strike) is to have a solid backup scheme in place. Data recovery after the fact is always iffy at best.

If the drives has errors on it, attempts to image it will usually fail. The errors the OP listed indicate an image is extremely unlikely to succeed.

Yes, it is possible the enclosure damaged the drive or was incompatible. But the drive most likely is damaged since the so called experts the OP took the drive to were also apparently unable to read it.

And finally, do you want to be responsible if the OP loses data due to advice you gave that might have otherwise been recoverable by a pro?

 

[Nedly]

What you have said nearly repeats what I tried to say, which is the fact that he can either stake the money and send it away, or risk losing data and doing it himself. I contradict what his tech may have said because I doubt he took into consideration certain circumstances. I personally, at this point in time, do not believe the drive is physically damaged and that this is a glitch moment. In fact, I would nearly put money on it. What I suggested was for him to consider his options logically, including the risks, and pursue them properly. What is the point of trying to perform physical repairs when it has not been absolutely determined that it is not some other mundane issue? I would not assume to the same degree, and the pro's you speak of will in fact run a type of diagnoses on the drives functionality before they begin any physical repairs.

When sending it away is not an option due to funds or non interest, the next best option when attempting repairs yourself is to create a disk image and then try to run tests on the drive.

 

[gregrocker]

Exactly which HD Diagnostic was run from boot disk on the hard drive and tells you that it is failed? This is the only way to know with certainty that it has indeed failed.

Otherwise a RAW drive may refer to the file system problems that are recoverable. The first test to try is what GokAy suggested by running Partition Wizard Partition Recovery Wizard - Video Help

The decision that your data was not important enough to have backed up was made long before this happened. Data which is that important should be backed up in real time using something like Sync, Backup and Store your Files to the Cloud with OneDrive . At the minimum there should be regularly scheduled Backup User and System Files