Hard Drive Recovery

[Richard Jung]

We have a hard drive running slow and starting to go bad. Any of the IT guys have recovery software or can recommend someone?

Thanks,

Rick

[Jeff Stuart]

I've never personally used it, but I've heard many good things about SpinRight: http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Though, now that I look at it, it's surprisingly expensive ($89).

[Mike Simanyi]

That's cheap. Wait for a drive to really crash and you're probably spending more like $1500+ for an outside agency to recover the data (if you don't have a backup, that is.)

Any of the drive cloning utilities should do it if the disk is still functional.

Mike

[Mako Koiwai]

Junk it. Buy a better high end one and restore from your back-up/off site storage. Recovery is expensive, because they can ask whatever they want, even if it's easy for them

[Richard Jung]

Thanks. It's taking a long time to copy file over, and crashes during some transfers to the new drive. We'll try the software mentioned.

[Mako Koiwai]

I was using MOZY for my automatic off-site back-up ... but they are getting expensive. As more an more folks take more and more digital photos ... with cameras that have larger and/or more densely packed sensors, and now more and more video ... the off-site/cloud storage services are being overwhelmed and have to charge more.

I've switched to BackBlaze ... but there are others to consider ... there are numerous reviews and comparisons online:

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/ ... ?artc_pg=2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,2806,4798,00.asp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Will Kalman]

If you get desperate, blow cold air on the drive electronics while it runs, if you can. The colder the better.

Past that, put the drive in a sealed bag in the refrigerator for a while. Once it's completely cold, immediately plug it into the PC and try your file copy. Being able to plug it into a USB adapter so you don't have to go through bootup is a plus. If this is a boot drive, you can plug it into another computer.

[Mako Koiwai]

"Dust-off" = cold "air" ... especially upside down. "watch" for thermal cracking.

[Richard Jung]

Interesting! Thanks

[Q V]

If it's still reading/writing, another alternative is to try to clone the drive onto another drive.

Norton Ghost works pretty well. I personally used something that came w/ my Kingston SSD to copy over data from a dying laptop hdd. Worked great.

QV

[Kurt Rahn]

I don't know if you're a Mac guy or a PC guy, but for the Mac, I've been using a Mac program called Data Rescue 3 (http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php). Recovered stuff off a couple dead HDs and even once out of the emptied trash. It's not cheap (about $100), but I manage a network of about 80 computers, so it was a no-brainer for me.

[Richard Jung]

I'm a mac person, but the drive is on our PC CAD workstation. We'll be trying some the software over the weekend - thanks!

[John Stimson]

The most common type of "data recovery" software is designed to find deleted files or retrieve files from a hard drive with a corrupted file allocation table. If your hard drive's hardware is degrading but you can still access all your files, that's not the right utility to run -- it will pound on the drive pretty hard. You just want to run an image copy program that will get the data copied off with a minimum of activity. There might be programs that can put the drive into a lower performance mode and copy the data "gently" but I don't know anything about them if they exist.

Copy the most critical stuff first, by itself, to make sure that you at least get that.

The data recovery services can take the platters out of your dead drive and install them in a working drive. Which is great if your dead drive didn't drop the heads on a spinning platter. They charge a lot. What's your data worth?

[Q V]

Richard, if you want to try the image cloning program (after/if you can copy the most important stuff out right now individually), you can borrow my program. If you have a hdd enclosure, it will make life even easier for you.