Railfan Technology > Data Recovery off Failed Drive

Well Happy Pre-New Year to all...

Has anyone used or recommend a drive recovery specialist for a failed external 1TB Seagate Drive?? It seems sort of impossible that data is totally unrecoverable, when law enforcement can MOST always recover data off computers and or drives that have been totally wiped or damaged.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Wishes for a great start to the New Year.

Best,

CSXCOPHOTOGRAPHER

Can't you just check with the company IT department?

Here are two local businesses for the DFW area:

http://www.datarecovery.net/us/tx/fort-worth-tx-data-recovery.aspx

http://www.24hourdata.com/dallas-data-recovery

I have not had to use either one in recent years so I do not have a recommendation, but they do offer free estimates.

Good luck good buddy and a happier new year after this hurdle!

Unfortunately, they do not control drives that contain personal photos, aka sports and entertainment files.

Thanks for the suggestions all.

It probably also helps to be an actual employee.

I thought Seagate had a protocol for failed drives?

Seems that's why folks buy Seagate drives, otherwise a two drive set-up should be used.

Was it on continual backup or daily back-up? Theory says continual back up will fail really quick, daily next, then weekly.

Yes, they are not going to help railroad contractors.

Your post may get better responses of reposted under Railfan Technology.

I have valued files backed-up on three local PCs as well as on two commercial backup services (DataDepositBox and SpiderOak). If local hardware goes inoperable or gets destroyed, I can pull down the files from any PC that is connected to the Internet. Also, there are numerous disk analysis and data recovery tools available (often freeware) via the Internet. One of my favorites is GPARTED. Download the ISO image, boot from CD or DVD and see what it tells you about your problem drive.

John

I think his is external drive so not sure you have to boot from CD or recovery USB.?????

People I know of have gotten "most" of their files back, but not a file system.

I'd also be very careful what if anything you do personally to the drive in recovery tho most programs should be safe.

Bob

One of mine failed about 2 years ago... on the recommendation of a friend, I put it in the freezer for a few hours, and it worked again just long enough to get the data ported to another drive.

hoydie17 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One of mine failed about 2 years ago... on the
> recommendation of a friend, I put it in the
> freezer for a few hours, and it worked again just
> long enough to get the data ported to another
> drive.


That is interesting! As a followup, it wouldn't hurt to try again after a day, but you may have done that already.
Bob

I have a 2-TB Toshiba USB drive. I boot PC from GPARTED ISO CD-IMAGE and GPARTED had no problem finding the 2-TB drive and the partitions within that drive.

John

I haven't had the freezer trick work in a good number of years. Typically it used to only really work on stuck spindles - things where the platters weren't physically spinning because of a stuck bearing or the like. Sometimes it would unstick the bearings (by contraction) enough to break things free and get the motor started. If it's spinning, this probably won't do much good and you risk condensation where you don't want it by doing this in humid environments.

The data likely is 99% intact, and either the drive tracking information is toast, part of the filesystem is corrupt, or the electronics have started to go bad (the worst of all options, as the recovery company will need an identical drive to get the parts from). Unfortunately I don't have a lot of recommendations for recovery firms. Thankfully the last time I had to go through that expensive mess was 15 years ago, so any advice I might have is far outdated.

I had the USB controller on an external drive fail. This might be the case. If so, the drive can be transplanted into a working computer, and the data may still be accessible. All you need to know if the hard drive is IDE or SATA and have an open place in your computer case along with the appropriate IDE or SATA connection available. This method is a lot cheaper than using a data recovery service. So, the big question is: Are you willing to open the external hard drive case? If so, you may find out quickly which component failed. Also, if the controller has failed, a new external hard drive case can be purchased from many places such as Newegg.


Cass Telles
"Slow-Approach-Slow" - 'Go by way of the B&O'
Railroads of NW Ohio
http://www.trainweb.org/rrnwoh
My photostream on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctelles/

Go to www.grc.com. Look for the SpinRite program. Maybe this might help.

I second the suggestion by Cass. Every external drive failure I've had was not the drive itself, but something in the case. If you can pop the drive out and mount it in another case, or directly in a machine, there is a good chance the drive will behave normally allowing you to retrieve your data off of it.