judenihal

My laptop is usually on 24/7 and basically my room is HOT, so I think my hard drive over heated. The 1st time when I tried to use it, it was not in windows and said IDE Error, Press F1 and it booted into Windows but the 2nd time it froze before the windows splash screen appeared and the hard drive was reading hard, then stopping, then reading hard, then stopping. It was not clicking, but wasn't booting into Windows.

Then I downloaded the Hitachi Hard Drive Diagnostic ISO and burn't it on CD-RW and booted it on my laptop to do the hard drive test.

When it did that, the hard drive wasn't reading hard and stopping but after diagnostic, it gave me this hard drive error:

0x72 - Defective Drive. S.M.A.R.T Failure.

TRC: 72026714

Now, I know this hard drive is defective and I can always go on ebay and waste about 10 or 20 dollars on a new 2nd hand one, or use my spare 60 gb hard drive I have, I even have a 10 gb hard drive which I put in later in the laptop to see if the machine worked, which I am glad it did, but this is not the case. I have some data which I need to backup from it.

Is there a way of making it work temporarily so that I can get the drive to work for a short time before it breaks again? I really need the data badly. I also tried the freezer thing and it didn't work. Maybe should I open up the drive and move something for it to work again?

I bought an 2.5 to 3.5 adapter and connected it to one of my desktop machine and when I turned it on, it told me the hard drive is defective, backup and replace. then I booted into Windows XP and after the splash screen, the hard drive is trying to read and is freezing the entire computer. The hard drive spins and there is disk activity, but it keeps reading hard and stopping.

Is there a way of opening up the disk and adjusting and fixing whatever broke so that I can temporarily access the data? I don't want to use this broken hard drive anymore. I just want to access one file. How do I get the data out?

Somebody please help.

_02

Don't open the hard drive.

If your SMART data is going bad, that indicates your HDD is failing or has failed. If you can't get the drive to be recognized by the operating system or BIOS, there isn't much you can do.

If it's not clicking, there is a CHANCE that the motherboard on the HDD can be replaced. Or, the drive can be failing mechanically, which you can NOT adjust yourself. You can take it to a shop and pay them to *SEE* if they can swap the board.

OR - you can run a recovery program such as Spinrite to see if it can make out the data. You will likely only get back files, not filenames, not directory structures. But if the hard disk is not being recognized by the computer, there is little you can do.

Your last option would be a data recovery lab with a clean-room they can dissect the HDD in. That can run into the thousands of dollars.

Hard disk failure sucks.

Make backups!

judenihal

Make backups!

^ I did, but the ONE file I backed up was the wrong file and I need the file badly.

http://www.drivecrash.com/

^ They are offering free evaluation. Do you think they would charge me little for getting out one file?

About Spinrite, I will try it out and see if that works.

_02

I don't think they will have the ability to recover a specific file.

They usually recover the whole disk and give it to you on DVD. I think the labor involved in even getting to that point is why it's so expensive.

Couldn't hurt to ask though.

Spinrite might be able to recover if it can recognize the disk. It can take a LOOOOOOONG time though.