Dying hard drive?

**nedkelly** · 15-09-2010, 03:57 PM

I have a Seagate Barracuda 80gbIDE drive that I think is dying because it shows up in the BIOS but wont show up in windows at all, I stuck it in my Powermac on a hunch, it showed up I could see the properties but would not open at all. I ran Spinrite on it but it wouldnot get past about 3.7%. Any ideas as to how I can get the data back from the drive without having to go to a data recover company?

**wainuitech** · 15-09-2010, 04:13 PM

Have you tried Booting from A linux (ubuntu) live CD, then plugging in a USB drive and copying the data to that ?

Failing that I would use Getdataback, that will often see and recover data on damaged drives.

Its not free, (well the trial is) it only goes as far as seeing the data, it wont actually recover it till its paid for, but if you do that sort of thing a bit, its well worth the Money.

**Deimos** · 15-09-2010, 04:33 PM

Try Recuva, its free.

I wouldn't hold out much hope of recovering the data if the drive is actually dead (unless you want to pay a small fortune to a data forensics expert like the guys at Computer Forensics)

**Snorkbox** · 15-09-2010, 04:39 PM

I know you said it does not show up in Windows but is that Win Explorer or does it not show up in disk management either?

**nedkelly** · 15-09-2010, 04:54 PM

@Deimos and Snorkbox: The drive will not show up in windows at all, not even in disk managment, would not even work on my bartpe disk.
@wainuitech: Did not work with Puppy but will see what Ubuntu does

**wainuitech** · 15-09-2010, 05:54 PM

Try the Getdataback, with the drive slaved- I have had that read drives that nothing else will, as long as they were showing in the BIOS it could read it most of the time, or throw up a error saying the drive is damaged.

lots of those free recovery programs are OK for minor recovery, but for harder you need better software.

I have had getdataback read drives that have caused the PC to hang for ages on startup, sure slow to load, but if any software will that GDB will.

Guess the data is not backed up

**Snorkbox** · 15-09-2010, 05:58 PM

My first thought about the data too.

**nedkelly** · 15-09-2010, 08:47 PM

No dont have my project finished yet so this is the only copy of the data, what ever it is.
Strange thing has happened now, after running Spinrite now the drive shows up in windows.