In need of hard drive Guru!!!

So last weekend the hard drive in the office computer went south for the summer. We had been getting a couple of times where the computer was going a little slow, and we were preparing to get a new computer and transfer files. Before that could happen the worst had occurred: When the computer was rebooted the boot screen came up with "hard drive not found" and that was all she wrote.

Since then we have found the following. If we wait several hours and start the computer up, SOMETIMES it will go through the boot process, get into the log in screen, and after the login we were at the desktop, then the computer froze up. Rebooting again resulted in a "hard drive not found" error.

We tried to replace the circuit board with an identical board, with the same revision on it. No good there as the drive then clicked and clicked and did nothing. Reinstalled the original board and again SOMETIMES it will try and boot, but as soon as it warms up, BAM, system locks up. I have tried an external enclosure to eliminate the computer itself as being at fault. Same thing there. External drive enclosure hooked up, and the laptop will give me the tone that a new USB device is connected, but no drive shown in the windows explorer screen.


Any advice? I have considered getting a plastic bag and a bucket of ice to get it nice and cold, suspecting that thermal expansion is the problem.

 

Bump once for those who are on in the evening....

 

Might try it in the freezer first, I've heard of people doing that.

 

I'd say you're pretty close to hosed. But here's what I'd do next.

Put the hard drive in the external enclosure. Then put the whole setup in the freezer. You don't want any frost to form on the drive.

Prepare another computer with enough disk space to get the data off the bad drive.

Get the receiving computer up and running.

As quickly as you can plug in the frozen drive. You want it as cold as possible.

Listen for the bad drive to spin up and/or any ugly scrapping noises.

If there are no spinning sounds twist the drive left and right to jiggle the platters free.

If there are ugly scrapping sounds stop right now before more damage is done.

If the computer gods are with you the drive will appear and you can copy the data. Do not stop until all of the data is copied or the hard drive fails again.

Good luck. In my experience once a drive gets to this point the odds are really against you. A data recovery place can usually get your stuff, but they are spendy.

 

Thanks for the advice. I was looking at the freezing option. The drive spins up normally every time. I think the problem lies with the circuit board "warping" for lack of a better term, when it warms up.

 

Possible something has come unsoldered. I've had this happen with an iPod and some other electronics. Freezing works, but doesn't last long.

Be sure to make backups in the future.

 

You could try booting your computer into a linux os like Ubuntu...hoping that the drive stays on enough to mount to the os... if it does (which i doubt by what you described) you can connect another backup external drive and transfer files. its worth a shot i have had some success with this a couple times. Hope you can recover your data!

 

We had been using an external automatic backup system. What we DIDN'T know was that there was a glitch a while back and it hadn't backed up for the past 4 months, even though the daily reminder said it had. Go figure. Time for redundant backups at this point. lol.

 

Here's some random ideas

If you are worried about condensation on the drive, you could buy a cheap waterproof case like this, although I think a ziploc freezer bag would probably be OK for the short time you are using it. I think you could also use the external enclosure inside the bag, inside the freezer, and run the cord out of the freezer for some ghetto chilling.

with the second motherboard that you have, update the firmware all the way. It might fix a few bugs for a bit of extra stability. Boards ship with old firmware all the time, so don't assume it is up to date.

Try sticking the whole computer in the freezer and run an external monitor and keyboard while you are doing your rescue attempt

Once the drive is dead, RMA it. Hard drive manufacturers have astounding warranties, most lasting 5 years. Most sites you just plug in the serial # from the drive and they give you instant feedback on your warranty status and how to ship it back for a new one. The hardest part is the packaging requirements.

Once you are dealing with your new system, you might look into crashplan. My IT director turned me on to it for home and I'm starting the trial. They support backups from computer to computer, computer to external drive, and computer to the cloud.
I just got through backing up 55GB to their cloud backup solution, and now it just sits and monitors for changes to upload.
I will say that they don't do a great job of explaining the install or setting good defaults. Two things I change:
1. You need to go in and set the upload speeds. It comes set at Unlimited, which kills the internet for any other devices. My xbox went offline, my cell stopped getting email and weather updates, etc., until I scaled this back down. My upload is 10Mbps through Comcast, so I set Crashplan to use 1Mbps while using the computer and 2Mbps when I'm away from it (since I might still be using the internet on other devices). Realistically it shouldn't have to use much traffic after the initial load, unless you just got through dumping a bunch of videos onto your computer.
2. There's a setting somewhere that says how long the cloud service will keep deleted files. I scale it from 'forever' down to '1 month'. If I deleted a file and it's been a month, chances are I don't ever need it again. This helps keep my recovery size down so that in case of catastrophe, there's less data to worry about bringing back. Even though they give you unlimited space, I reason that this setting keeps storage sizes on Crashplan's servers down, which probably keeps chances of costs from increasing down the road.

 

Yeah, the plan is to go with a ziploc bag to slip the drive into while it rests on a bed of ice. The original computer is being scrapped as we bought a laptop to replace the primary computer now. As for firmware, it was constantly checked and kept up to date. Always a good suggestion of course.

To save time I don't plan to boot from the computer, so no need to put the entire computer into the freezing chamber. I'm going to use the hard drive enclosure on the 2.0 USB cable. That way I can have the backup hard drive up and running, and the laptop up and running, then power up the drive, and start copying the key folders. While it would be nice to copy the entire drive, there are certain folders that I MUST have, so those come first. Once those are copied I will then try to copy the rest of the drive. The entire drive content is about 250GB, including Windows. I plan on skipping that folder as it is not needed.

 

A couple of my clients use Crashplan and Soonr. I've dabbled with each. Pretty easy to use for offsite backups, cheaper than Carbonite too.

I'll echo what's been said above. Chill it and pray. Once it gets this bad, the odds aren't really pretty but it isn't beyond hope.

 

Not sure if you have given up on this or not, but I had a friend whos hard drive crashed in his laptop. I took the drive out, put it in an external dock. Sure it was clicking like you're referring too. You can try freezing it first but most likely condensation will form inside the drive because of the tiny air breather holes.

Once I had it in the dock, I brought up computer management and assigned it a drive letter since windows explorer wouldn't see it. Then simply pulled up command prompt and ran the xcopy command with the needed switches and pulled his data off. It literally took a day or two for it to copy the data since the drive was bad, but it was worth it. Saved a couple hundred gigs or pictures and photoshop files for him. Got a free meal ticket to the Cheesecake Factory plus scored some cash.