Who's up for a challenge? - HD Crash (Any advice welcome)

S

SimplyAfrica

Geek Trainee
Okay boys,

Ever seen the movie apollo 13? Well this is similar. We have a life and death problem with limited resources and complete isolation from the real world.

Here's the situation.

I am in a remote part of South Africa.

The business I work for hasn't backed up their Book Keeping and Point of Sale system in ages.

The hard drive has crashed.

The drive goes : ZOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!, click-click, click-click. ZOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!, click-click, click-click.

It does this a few times then gives up.

The OS the machine was running is Ubuntu Linux (Newest release)

The data is stored in a MySQL database on the OS.

The next time someone is coming from a main city where there is a data recovery company is in 5 weeks time.

I HAVE TO get the data out of this drive.

-------------------------------------------------
What we're dealing with :

A Western Digital 40GB hard-drive (quite old)
The drive is ATA
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What's available to us :

1) Another Ubuntu Machine
2) An external case that can be used with this drive
3) An iMac & MacBook Pro both running leopard
4) A windows XP machine
5) A windows vista home premium machine
6) A 1GB flash disk
7) Some CDs and DVDs
8) Some lan cables
9) A cat
10) The internet
11) A cat
12) Lots of tools

-------------------------------------------------
The symptoms :

Aside from the clicking, when a machine running the disk as master boots up it throws up "Disk boot failure, insert system disk".

The drive, when in the external case, does not mount on OS X nor does it appear in Disk Utility.

When in the other ubuntu machine as slave, it does not appear at all.

The same when placed into the XP machine, nothing in device manager, nothing at all.

The drive does show up on the BIOS setup.

Placing the drive in the freezer for 2 hours did nothing. It just made my hands cold.

The data holds a list of debtors and their totals so it's IMPERATIVE that we get this thing sorted.

That's the story. If you have ANY ideas, anything at all. Please, I'm waiting on baited breath.

You have your mission!
 
Welcome to HWF :)

First of all, your supervisor needs to be punished for not providing a backup strategy :)

Now the best solution would be some data recovery software. Two of those are Ontrack Data Recovery and Quick Recovery. As far as I know, there are no free data recovery applications. But most of them offer a free trial version. With a trial version, you are able to view the files that it can recover. But restoring would only be possible after purchasing a license.

So my advice is to install a trial version of different data recovery applications, and see which application is able to recover your data and has an acceptable price.
 
Thanks for the welcome!!

And thanks for the reply!

I have already tried recovery software that I read about on a website.

It was called PC inspector.

It had an option for locating "lost drives" but all it could find was the windows master.

I will try your suggestions. Hopefully they will be able to at least see the disk if nothing else!

Thanks again! I'll report back soon.
 
Ah...

Just had a look at the software. Both state that the software can only be used if the hardware is functioning properly.

It seems to me that this hardware is certainly not functioning properly.

"Signs That Your Computer is Damaged or Failing :
- Strange noises or grinding sound
- Blue screen of death
- Unresponsiveness"
 
SimplyAfrica said:
Ah...

Just had a look at the software. Both state that the software can only be used if the hardware is functioning properly.

It seems to me that this hardware is certainly not functioning properly.

"Signs That Your Computer is Damaged or Failing :
- Strange noises or grinding sound
- Blue screen of death
- Unresponsiveness"
Click to expand...
The Ontrack website shows that you need to send a damaged drive to a repair center. This might be an option, if software can't save the contents of the drive.
 
SimplyAfrica said:
Placing the drive in the freezer for 2 hours did nothing. It just made my hands cold.
Click to expand...
freezing a HDD does not damage a HDD, but you didn't freeze it for long enough, typically a HDD should be in a freezer for about 3 days and if it works you should have about 20 mins to retrieve data

repeat this process until all important data is retreived

this only works for about 1 in 10 drives

the way it works is:

a HDD has circular platters & read / write heads which move very close to the surface of the platters, if an unknown event happend & the platters somehow became attatched to the read / write head

as the different metals making the armature of the read / write head expand & contract at different temps, well thats the theory anyway, good luck
 
I had a friend who worked for a recovery center. He told me that usually when they saw a physical failure of a HDD, it was a moving part that failed, not necessarily the platters which hold the data. That in mind, if you get yourself an identical model HDD, a pair of sterile latex gloves, a can of air and a torx driver, you may be able to move the data platters over to the new drive and get it running long enough to archive off the data. You'll want to do this in a room with as little dust as possible, as dirt on the data layer can render your information unreadable. Should you choose to do so, you do this entirely at your own risk, and we take zero responsibility for your actions should you take our free advice. :)

Of course, in the future the most easy and cost-effective solution to avoid data loss via HDD failure is by setting up a mirrored RAID (aka RAID1). Linux does this natively, and the process is quite simple. That does not alleviate the need for regular, offsite backups, but it will double the likelihood that you won't need to use the backups in the first place. Let us know if you need any other help.
 
AT said:
I had a friend who worked for a recovery center. He told me that usually when they saw a physical failure of a HDD, it was a moving part that failed, not necessarily the platters which hold the data. That in mind, if you get yourself an identical model HDD, a pair of sterile latex gloves, a can of air and a torx driver, you may be able to move the data platters over to the new drive and get it running long enough to archive off the data. You'll also want to do this in a room with as little dust as possible, as dirt on the data layer can render your information unreadable. Of course, you do this entirely at your own risk, and we take zero responsibility for your actions should you take our free advice. :)

Of course, in the future the most easy and cost-effective solution to avoid data loss via HDD failure is by setting up a mirrored RAID (aka RAID1). Linux does this natively, and the process is quite simple. That does not alleviate the need for regular, offsite backups, but it will double the odds that you won't need to use the backups in the first place. Let us know if you need any other help.
Click to expand...

that sound a little drastic or a last resort and will probably render the data unrecovable

i should have mention this on my last post but you could try booting a Gparted live CD and try useing Testdisk to recover the data
personally i was able to recover about 95% of my data after an accidentally DBan-ing a drive
 
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