[snoj]

Alright, I have a dying harddrive here that also has just about every file I've ever created. So does anyone here know of a place I can send it to get the data off?

This is really, REALLY important.

[sontek]

http://www.harddriverecovery.org


Give those guys a call and see if they'll be able to help ya. The last time I had a hard drive start clicking/beeping I unplugged it and put it in my freezer ( I heard that it helps, dunno if its a myth ) and then an hour later plugged it back in and had enough time to pull off all the important files.

Its especially helpful if you run it in a seperate computer as to not be putting some pressure on it by having to run your operating system

[Thorian]

Buy another Harddrive then image the failing drive to the good one.

The freezer trick does work as a 1 time shot to get data off cause after it thaws it will never work again.

You freeze it for 24-48 hours to make sure that it is completely frozen then toss it into a box copy off your data and bam, unfortunately it seems that you only have an hour or so to get the data off because if it isnt completely dead by the time it thaws it will be.

[snoj]

An hour to transfer 60-100 GB's of data.....I'll try some other stuff first.

Thanks for the tips though!

[Thorian]

that is why I said to ghost it first.

Norton Ghost dosent take that long. should be only a few minutes.

But you should only attempt the freezer trick after you cannot recognize the drive anymore. Oh and dont mess with it untill you are ready to sit down and off copy all your data. You dont know howlong that thing will work without screwing up everything else.

[ashdragonz3]

In regards to the freezer trick, if it's a very large hard drive and your not sure if it'll last to copy it, dry ice should do the trick too...

[1lacca]

Can you isolate exactly why is your harddrive fails?
A electronics on the drive is crap?
B platters have some defect

In the first case A, you need a harddrive from the same series and same size and model as yours, and change the electronics - in college a bunch of guys did it, and it worked out well.

In case B partition and file recovery software can help you ( I used Get Data Back, but there are a bunch of them on the market). Always put your harddrive into another machine, so the recovery doesn't interfere with the OS!

Also, sometimes other components can make you believe that your harddrive went crap: a broken or loose wire in the IDE cable, power cable, or faulty RAM. So make sure that your harddrive is wrong!

And as Thorian said: make an image of your old harddrive before attempting to salvage any data!

This post has been edited by 1lacca: 09 April 2006 - 03:39 PM

[snoj]

This is just getting weirder and weirder. So I got my hands on a USB external drive thing from NicholasDavis (thanks man!) and it doesn't make those weird noises anymore. So I'm moving all the files and folders that I cannot easily replace and that should be done in about an hour.

I'm beginning to think that the motherboard's IDE is some how screwy or I've just overloaded the PSU.

Anyone know if 4 harddrives (one of them SATA), one DVD/CD-RW, a Radeon 9800 Pro, running off a AMD Sempron 64 based motherboard would overload a 420W PSU?

[born2c0de]

Be Careful dude...Hard Drive Errors are common and the most devastating.

[1lacca]

Depeneds on the technology (active PFC or not), efficiency of the PSU and the distribution of devices between the power rails. However with a decent unit there should be no problem. Try to measure the powerlevels with a multimeter in action. And again: don't rule out a faulty cable/socket.