Reading A Bad Hard Drive

[topherus]

My 40 Gig IBM Deskstar started beeping every second and clicking (stop laughing). Now I know about everything from spending hundreds of $ to a tech co. to putting the **** thing in the freezer. Short of all that, is there a program that can be run, say, from the CD-ROM drive that will allow me to at least view the drive? (Whenever I mount the bad hd as a primary slave, the BIOS won't read the master drive - connections are good and jumpers are set correctly). Also, I was told about Recoversoft. My hd isn't worth a $400 program.
Is there any other way to access or just view the drive?
I have data recovery programs (Stellar Phoenix, R-Studio , etc.) but to run them, I have to at least be able to boot up to a drive.

Not ready to give up the fight!

 

[Dr.Gootch]

get a 2nd hdd, and make the new one ur primary and this bad one ur secondary. or hook it up to a friends pc as a slave and u should be able to view it in windows.

 

[Sui]

Yeah you could get an external enclosure, jam it in there and see if you can even read it. You should have pulled all that data off your HD as soon as it started acting up, I serously doubt any data you get off that thing is gonna be worth the trouble, its probably full of errors. Seriously unless its something that can never be replaced, junk the drive and back it up next time.

 

[ramdge]

The clicking that you heard has probably messed up the
drive beyond repair.

If it won't boot as a slave drive with another drive as
the primary then you don't have any software options.
At that point your only options would be to disassemble
the drive and move the components.

This is what the drive recovery people do but it usually
requires a clean room and additional drive parts.

Keep the drive and periodically try it to see if you can
access it but I wouldn't think that it would work.