Broken SATA HDD

[g0sp33dracr]

so my Western Digital SE Caviar 120GB (WD1200JD) hard drive crapped out on me.

i use it as a secondary hard drive and it has tons of valuable data. the hard drive turns on. i can feel it heat up, but the computer doesn't read it.

my mobo is an asus p4s800d-x. when i hook it up to my mobo and load up windows xp pro, it freezes. i tried a sata controller that i used to use and when i load up windows the loading bar goes extremely slow. with the sata controller, xp loads up but it still doesn't read the hard drive.

any suggestions other than throwing it away would be useful. that data on my hard drive is extremely important.

 

[dcc]

One trick you could try is to double zip lock bag the hdd and put it in the freezer for about thiry minutes. Works for a short period of time with hdds that have problems spinning up.

 

[g0sp33dracr]

i alread tried that. theres this one site with 200 suggestions on how to fix your hard drive and they're all variations of the freeze-it-in-a-ziploc-baggie method.

right now i'm thinking about changing the pcb and bought the same hard drive on the internet. its kinda hard to find the exact same one from the same month tho.

if that doesnt' work, i'm gonna try and change the platters, which no one really knows for sure if it works. some people say that it does, but most of its hearsay.
i'm gonna say that its about 5% chance of working without screwing up the platters.

any comments would be helpful at this moment.

 

[OatesyX]

erm im pretty sure you need a clean room to change platters of a hd, im sure theres companys on the web which offer professional repair for hds, google my friend , google

 

[dcc]

R.I.P.

 

[poorman]

I saw a video of a dude that opened the top off a drive, put it on his desk, turned it on and windows saw it. He then proceeded to start opening files off of it. This went on for 15min+ still without a head crash. Very interesting stuff so this whole changing of platters might have a better success rate than we all thought?
You say "valuable data" then you should be trying this stuff yourself, you need to send it out to one of the many data recovery companies.

 

[CrazeD]

If you get like one spec of dirt on the platters then it will screw up.

 

[g0sp33dracr]

well, problem w/ sending it to professionals is that i'm poor.

and you don't necessarily need a clean room, just a good work area thats not dirty. ex. garage.

getting one spec of dirt, lint, or random pieces of crap shouldn't be the biggest worry. if you work in a garage there's not gonna be much of that. its where you have to transfer the platters when it gets tricky.

thx for the replies. i think i'm pretty much good for now w/ these past few days researching on google.

 

[CrazeD]

Your garage must be different than my garage...my garage has dirt, gunk, grime, grease...everywhere! lol