First, don't open it up. It will never work again -- not because it is difficult to open and then close back up, but because of dust. They are assembled in hyper-clean room conditions. Any microscopic particle will screw them up.

If the drive is still partly operational, you can use Ontrack software to recover things. If it isn't, they have services (although expensive) where they actually do, if necessary, open up the drive. Check them out at:

Ontrack

Whatever you do, do not write to the disk at all. If possible, remove it, and make it a slave to another drive.

Also, one trick I used on a hard drive that I just sent back for repair is to place it in the refrigerator for several hours, and then quickly install it and offload the files. Often times, the problems are heat related, and the cooling shrinks the platters down far enough that you can recover files. I was able to get about 15 minutes of copying done at a time before the drive failed again. Back into the fridge for several hours, and then another 15 minutes. I eventually recovered everything, and the drive was still under warranty (my external Maxtor, BTW).

Done all that, nothing can open or even examine the drive, so I'm guessing the platters/media is damaged somehow.
I called Drivesavers, they tell me cost will run between $1400.00 and $3900.00. None of the data is worth that much to me. It's a major inconvenience, but I can recover without the data. But anything I can get back, if anything, I'd like to. I've used software recovery tools before with some success, but from what Drivesavers and other recovery places have told me, this is a hardware repair, with manual rebuilds of the contents of the drive.

If the cooling trick does work, for convenience try cooling it in the fridge and then put in Esky with some dry ice or cooling bricks. You should be able to get an IDE cable long enough to connect it to the system and keep it in the Esky.

I'd also put it into a plastic bag with some desicant before chilling it otherwise condensation could make matters worse.

Bob.

I'm going through the same problem on my home system now. Got back from vacation and couldn't even power up the computer. Did troubleshooting with Dell tech support and traced it to the HD. So far, the best deal I've found on data recovery is from Data Recovery Clinic, with flat rate pricing at $995 for invasive recovery (opening the drive), with no diagnostic fee and no fee if nothing is recovered. I'm still debating on whether or not to take the plunge. I've replaced the drive and most of the software, but the old drive has tons of digital family pictures and school and work documents, and of course little of it is backed up. Tough way to learn a basic lesson. I suppose I'll bite the bullet and pay to get it back, but it seems like there should be a better way.

Spot, there's a very good chance you can get your data out. I've never used the "Spinrite" utility, but the author (Steve Gibson) is a famous programmer and there are lots of stories around the Internet about his Spinrite disk-recovery program.

You might first find this article interesting.

I once had a vacation. Hard to believe, now a days, but once.

When I got back, the HD would not boot. There was nothing wrong when I left, so there should not have been anything wrong when i got back. It was just 7 years old. I talked with several people at the manufacturer and several techs around town.

Now, remember, this was about 6 years ago, so this drive was made about 12 or 13 years ago.

The problem was diagnosed as "Stiction" or "The rotor was sticking because the lubricant had thickened over time."

I understand that this is less of a problem, now, but it has NOT completely gone away, as witnessed by the fact that every Christmas and other long break the local University where I work loses several drives in their labs if they turn them off. This is particulatly bad in cold weather when they turn the heat off for vacations in winter.

The material was "irreplacable" but not terribly valuable, if you get what I mean. The drive was well out of warranty, and as far as I was concerned, shot. I wasn't about to spend a lot of money on it, and was about to throw it away, when an idea hit.

I got ready for doom, and put the former boot drive on a long slave cable outside the case, with a new, bigger drive as the new boot-master to accept the files IF they copied. I then removed all the screws, but didn't open the case on the old drive.

I then booted the machine, which told me that I had only one functional Boot drive and one that wasn't working properly. I setup everything, including the commands necessary in a BAT file, and took a deep breath. I then REBOOTED.

EARLY, while rebooting, I removed the case top and using my very clean finger, only on the edge, I spun the platter as hard as I could, put the top back on quickly. The drive WAS recognized.

As soon as I could, I started the BAT file, which contained the proper Xcopy commands (DOS, remember that?) to copy from the bad to the good HD.

It worked, completely. But the next time I tried to access that drive it was "DOA." Kaput! Nothing could access it. Too much trash had entered it during that brief time when I lifted the top, spun, and closed it as fast as I could. It never worked again.

But, I got my data back. If all else fails, AND it is a matter of stiction, AND you are willing to throw the whole thing, data and all away, AND you feel, "what have you got to lose?" It is an interesting experiment.

But don't blame me! It WILL destroy the HD if you open it.

Well gees guys I see CSI recover data all the time from those drives even when they are in a fire. I wonder if they are "funnin" me.

JJK

Interesting stuff...I used Ontrack, and it said that only a few hundred files out of over 100K files were recoverable.
Read the Spinrite article, put the drive in the freezer with a towel around it as suggested on teched's forums, and put it back in a 1394 enclosure while it was still frozen/cold. I also put a Blue Ice bar on top and under it.
Warmed up in about 10 minutes, BUT! Both Spinrite and Ontrack were able to see more files. So, I'm slowly recovering some files. Thank heaven the Instant Vegas and Vegas 5 books were turned in, because some of the text on those had not been backed up. I'm hopeful of recovering much of our Basics of DVD authoring and Basics of DV books.
Makes me sick I've not done full backups since NAB.
Guess I've learned my lesson.
Thank you all SO MUCH for the input, ideas, etc.Wouldn't have found the Spinrite, and even though I've used Ontrack, they were off my radar.
Funny thing, I bought a Seagate 100 gig for replacement, and it comes with backup software for auto backups.
Now I'm looking for auto-backup software so I don't have to be so foolish again.

wcoxe1,

That's the funniest damn geek story I've heard in ages! "my very clean finger" and slamming it shut - hilarious! Glad to hear it worked.

Greg

Spot, I believe you have a new chapter for your books. Backup and recovering ideals. Spot, don't feel too bad. I know a couple of major software companies and Federal agenies that had a nightmare experience because they failed to verify their backup software was working properly. The software reported successfull completion. Nobody checked if the backup would actually do a complete restoration, a couple of files and it error out.

Hey Spot -
Don't give up yet!

On two occasions I've been completely saved by www.totalrecall.com

I remeoved the hard drive from the computer, hooked it up with a firewire connection, as an outboard drive and went to the above address.
The drive, which wouldn't even mount or be seen, was completely recovered.

Give it a try.

ERK

I stress, it only worked ONCE!

Then the drive became an "Open demonstration" model at the local University.

I like Spot's solution MUCH better. Today, I think I'd try the long cable into the "ice box" (boy am I dating myself.) with SpinRite and other recovery utilities.

The autobackup seems logical, too. But, nothing I do these days, other than my taxes, seems all that important.

On the other hand, who wants to be audited. I think I'll back that stuff up right now.

By, y'all!

Sorry to hear about the HD headaches... you've just inspired me to go make another mirror of my main hard drive ... I use the acronis mirror utility, it's great.. google "data recovery" and there's a lot of services, though expensive I think..

Ken

Another, less invasive way to deal with "sticktion" is to VERY gently tap the drive casing while applying power to the drive. In most cases, this is enough to overcome the resistance on the spindle, yet doesn't require opening the case. Obviously, the trick is to be as gentle as possible when tapping the drive casing so as not to damage the heads or cause the heads to gouge the platters.

This only applies, of course, to drives that don't spin up - won't help if you have a drive that is spinning well but just not reading.

Bob.

We have an old wine cooler left over from our Media 100 days, where we kept our SCSI drives at a cool 68 degrees. It has IDE and SCSI cables already coming out of it, with spray foam. It's no longer in the storage room, it's now next to my desk while I work at recovering this thing. Slow but sure...

You've got a cooler next to your desk and all you are putting into it is a disk drive? This is the definition of GEEK! With all that cooling equipment, I'd add a few brewskies in there somewhere.

Regarding backup software:

There's a ton of software out there, and lots of editorial comment. I've personally used maybe 6 of the more popular programs from time to time.

I use DriveImage occasionally to make a master backup. No matter how my PC or drive gets trashed, I can be back up and running in about an hour. What's even more important is that I don't have to laboriously reload XPpro, then all my software, then make all the tweaks, etc. My PC has literally hundreds of various programs on it, and as I type this there are, let's see..., 55 processes running in the background, doing various things. It would be a royal pain to recreate that environment.

I tried Ghost for a while, and while it was faster than DriveImage, I got burned once, so switched back to DriveImage.

The major problems with doing daily image backups are that it takes a lot of time and space. For daily backups one can use any of dozens of backup programs. Besides the official Microsoft XP backup, I've enjoyed using Stomp's "BackupMyPC" program, which closely resembles the excellent backup utility included with W98.

The problem with nearly all these backup programs, however, is that they rely on the stupid archive bit. The program looks to see if the bit is set, and if it is, it means the file has changed, so it backs it up. The problem is that when doing a restore from a collection of incremental backups, any program relying on the archive bit system is blinded to whether a file that existed on an earlier incremental backup has later been removed. In other words, if you do a restore with a typical backup program, what you end up with will NOT be the same as what existed when you did your last backup.

There's one exception--Retrospect. This program ignores the archive bit and uses a different method. As you do your backups (my PC is set to backup every morning at 4am) a series of snapshots are created. You can go back to any snapshot and are guaranteed that after the restore your machine is EXACTLY as it was when the snapshot was taken. Retrospect is, to me, as good in the world of backup as Vegas is in the world of video editing. Great stuff.

Good luck with your hard drive.

Also use Retrospect and Driveimage and can attest to them saving me more than once.

For added paranoia I make my images from Driveimage on a removable HDD which I turn off when I'm done. Now I need to do offsite saves.

Larry

Spot, if I understand you correctly, you are recovering some files. This implies that the disk heads are functioning, which means probably no "hard" drive failure. This does not mean you can recover all your files. Recently a friend experience a system drive failure every two days, turned out to be overheating of the drive. Actually the drive electronics were faiing because of overheating, the drive's cache would fault out, destorying the win2000 file pointers in use in the cache, non-used files were available, but not any that were in use. If this is similar to your problem, you can rebuild a lot of the file structure, but you do need specialize software and a lot of time. you stated 100k files, now the real question, have you defrag. the drive recently. If yes, you will be able recover more, if not, sent it out. If have you a lot very large files, your recovery odds increase. Best of luck!

note: you can make a mini clean room using a 50 gallon tank, N2 tank, air compressor with dehumidier,vacuum pump.... Most medical labs have Bac. hoods that are really close to clean rooms standards.

The drive can't be defragged, nothing but this software seems to want to read it. First thing I tried was chkdsk on it, then defrag. No defrag tool would read it.
Now I've installed Panda on the new system, and damn....I hate this stuff. I'm uninstalling it ASAP. I don't know that a virus took this drive (and another drive) down, but I'm not taking chances. We're putting an antivirus on here with a firewall package, but Panda AIN'T gonna be it. We used to use Panda, I liked it. This new titanium version sucks. Closes off the system so that nothing can access the net, nor the server, even with the DNS numbers input as 'clean' and permissioned.
I'm a weak networking person...I guess I need to learn more.

>>...cost will run between $1400.00 and $3900.00...

Holy cow!

I had always heard that it was expensive, but I didn't know it was THAT much.

I also have used Retrospect and Drive Image and they have performed superbly.

If you use both of those programs and do it right, you will never lose anything ever...barring a nulcear war, house fire, etc.