Dead harddrive - anything to do?

[Hans Lauring]

So my 500 GB SATA drive dissapeared on me. That is, it was still plugged in, but invisible to the computer (including in Diskmgmt.msc)
It's spinning up and clicking a lot, but its just not there.

Is there anything I can do (short of paying pos serious money)?

[Chris Nahr]

If it's clicking a lot and not showing up on the controller it's already dead, basically. You might leave it off for a few hours or days, maybe it comes back long enough to run SpinRite on it. Otherwise it's time for a new hard drive.

[Hans Lauring]

No matter what, it's time for a new harddrive, I was just wondering if there was any chance of getting enough life in it to copy stuff.
It was my game installs and download-drive, so it's mostly a hassle, not data I don't have elsewhere (but installing WoW from scratch to play WotLK is a bitch).

[RickH]

Take the drive out of the case. Plug in a power lead. Turn the machine on. Pick up the drive. If it's spinning, you'll feel a "gyro" effect as you rotate it from horizontal. If it's not spinning, it's dead and you can give up now.

If it's spinning, try using a self-booting CD of a Linux variant, like Knoppix. It can see stuff that Windows refuses to see, including drives that Windows says are blank and need to be formatted. If it can mount the drive, DO NOT TURN IT OFF, there's no guarantee it will ever mount again if its degrading. Have a FAT32 USB drive ready to copy off all the valuable data (writing to NTFS can be problematic for Linux).

If nothing else works, PC Inspector was able to retrieve files when nothing else I used could see them. However, the recovered files may have some corruption in the file names and the data. Be sure to inspect.

[EvilIdler]

I had a drive with the same symptoms. It could work for up to five minutes at a time until it stopped spinning again. Getting 170 gigs of music off it was a pain even with Linux available.

[Hans Lauring]

It's certainly spinning.
I experinced the gyro effect by accident, when I unplugged it last night and thought that if nothing else worked, that was a nifty thing to show the kids...

So I'll try some of those. Has anybody here ever tried the freezer-trick. It makes no sense to me, but a lot of people on the intertubes swear by it - of course a lot of people swear by numerology and homeopathy as well, so...

[Cormac]

Sorry, can't really help you with advice.. Just busy having the same problem with my 2 Month old 1TB WD My Book. Lots of stuff on there...
Basically its also spinning up, but not showing up in the explorer (on 2 differnt PCs, neither via USB or eSATA), so I suspect its also pretty dead.

Let me know if you have any success with the freezer trick! ;)

[Skipper]

If it works for a small bit when you first turn the PC on, then dies, the trick is to put them in the freezer overnight encased in several ziploc bags. Take it out, plug it in cold like that and get as much data as you can off of it before it dies.

If it doesn't work at all, you're screwed.

[Cormac]

Thanks, will give it a go tonight.
Would that give me problems with the warranty though? I mean it IS only 2 months old...

[Skipper]

Not really no. You're not damaging anything here that isn't already toast. You're trying to prevent the circuitry from heating up too much before you can get data off the drive.

You can do your replacement now, but I would attempt to get whatever data you can off it first.

[Cormac]

Just to give a quick update.. Freezing didn't help. Still can't access anything.
Damn harddrive. I knew I should've bought an internal one!

[rei]

uh you freeze a bare drive not the external hard drive enclosure.