Starting over...........

In an attempt to switch out hard drives on my undersized PC, everything became entombed on my "NEW" 200 GB hard

drive with the exception of about 20 gigs worth I was able to get on DVD before the drive completely failed. If

anyone knows any inexpensive tricks to get a stalled hard drive going, I'm all ears.

Couple of questions:

 

1. Does this drive contain your system, or was it just a storage drive with (I assume) Windows on another drive? <<

It's possible Windows isn't recognizing the drive (duh); possibly the jumpers are set incorrectly?

 

2. Have you been able to determine for sure if it's a hardware malfunction? << Consider getting a hard-drive enclosure

and and connecting via USB/Firewire.

Its a mirror of my smaller drive. I originally had it replace the smaller drive inside the computer, worked for a while, then stopped booting so I put the smaller drive back in and used a USB to connect the new one. That worked fine for a while so I removed all my photos from the small drive to free up space (and since they were on the larger drive now). I started backing up to DVD and got about halfway, then one day the new drive just wouldn't spin up. It tries over and over (spin, click, spin, click) and then gives up.

If your old drive is failing sometimes putting it in the freezer for a bit will allow it to last a little longer before conking

out again.

 

If your old drive is your original boot drive, and Windows is hosed, for about $20 - $30 you can get a little adapter to

plug onto the hard drive, then into your USB port. Boot to your 200 GB drive, then just read from the old drive as an

external hard drive.

 

Good Luck - Mark (professional network administrator/architect and amateur photographer)

Spin click, spin click...sounds like the drive failed. I like to run my new drives for a week or so before

putting them in production. Sorry, I missed the fact that the new drive failed. It's been my experience

that if a drive is going to fail it will usually do it fairly quickly or give you years of service before failing.

Try the freezer trick as a last resort.

 

Mark

Thanks Mark, I'll give that a try

If the photos are worth the cost you might want to try sending the drive to a data retrieval service.

Sentimental value mostly, but not worth the cost of data retrieval. Is quite a bummer though.........

no go on the freezing trick, thanks for the idea though........

Hi

 

Ouch!

I've had something similar happen.

Does it power up at all?

If it doesn't power up, it could just be the cct board.

If you can get an identical drive (model # and series) you might be able to swap cct boards and fire up the failed drive at least to recover your data.

 

Or, send it out to a data recovery service.

 

I've done both - and once in that order! :)

 

Good luck

 

c

Thanks Claudius, sorry I didn't see your post sooner. I spoke with the company that I bought the drive from, they will replace the drive for free, but I'll have to pay to get the data back. I would just keep the old drive until I can figure out how to retrieve everything, but the catch is.........to get a new drive, I need to send the old one back, which means the photo's on it that weren't backed up, will be gone forever.......unless. of course I pay for data recovery, which can't be cheap.

Buy an identical drive, open both the damaged and the new and swap platters... Make sure you do this in a dust free room. You may end up with two non-working drives but this trick has saved me a couple of times... Good luck.

Thanks Antoni, thats a reasonable idea, since the cost of another drive would be cheaper than data recovery.......I've learned my lesson from this whole experience, thats for sure!