Retrieve Data from a Dead HD

[Discusman]

Hi All,

I have a 80GB Western Digital E/IDE Hard drive. It makes ticking sound and I have been using it as a slave HD. Now the HD is completed dead, windows XP wont even boot when this HD is connected to my primary master HD.

I was wondering how can I retrieve some of the data (Excel spreadsheet) from this dead HD. Any idea?

Thanks in advance

 

[joelm3103]

Hi All,

I have a 80GB Western Digital E/IDE Hard drive. It makes ticking sound and I have been using it as a slave HD. Now the HD is completed dead, windows XP wont even boot when this HD is connected to my primary master HD.

I was wondering how can I retrieve some of the data (Excel spreadsheet) from this dead HD. Any idea?

Thanks in advance

You said you had it as a slave and it died; does it even recognize in the BIOS? Also what you meant by connected as a primary master...you mean as setting the drive as master and other as slave; if so it will not boot if the drive is dead. Have you tried a Linux LiveCD to see if you can still access the drive?

 

[carnageX]

You could try the freezer trick to see if you could get some of the data off or not.

 

[Discusman]

I disconnected the dead HD from my the master. Now the windows is working properly. I used to hit the F1 key to continue during boot up. Now I realized it was the bad HD caused the error message because BIO couldn't recognize the drive I guess.

I've never used any Linux or other trick to retrieve the data from a dead HD before. I may looking into it.

Thanks for the input.

 

[Harper]

Put hard drive in antistatic bag, then a freezer bag. Then leave hard drive in freezer over night.
Next morning, take hard drive out, let it warm up a little bit. Then slave it off another hard drive. As soon as you can see the hard drive again, just get what ever important data you may have ASAP.