Anyone know how to recover data from a failed HDD?

My internal storage drive (not the one that Windows is on) seems to have crapped out. It's a regular disk drive that's close to 10 years old at this point. I have a lot of junk on there that I don't care about, but there are some documents that I would really like to recover if possible. Anyone know how to do this?

The drive is visible in BIOS but not in Windows. Initializing in Disk Management didn't work. I have a SATA to USB cable so I pulled it out and connected it to the computer via USB and tried a couple of free recovery softwares which didn't work because they also don't recognize the drive. Didn't recognize it while it was in the PC, nor after connecting it via USB. Not sure what else to try at this point.

It was working fine just now, I was working in an excel spreadsheet that was saved on the drive and when I tried to save the file, I kept getting errors, then I noticed the drive wasn't accessible anymore.

 

The Mac Shop in Delaware has a good reputation.

 

This gets "hard" very rapidly. Look into professional recovery services if it's really worth it to you.

 

I had something similar happen last year in November. A few power surges at the house and my computer wouldn’t start windows and I couldn’t get to any of my data on any of the drives. I tried the recovery stuff at home and no luck.

took it to the local shop and they had it up and running the next day and I didn’t lose anything. I think it was $200ish bucks.

I would’ve said no thanks but I hadn’t backed up my 2021 or 2022 sports stuff I do as I was working in the files cleaning them all up when it happened.

Lesson learned I constantly save everything now to my external hard drive and unplug it before walking away from computer.

 

Everyone seems to have to learn that lesson that "hard" way. Plenty of companies standing in line to take your money though. DriveSavers is just the first of the top of my head.

DriveSavers: Data Recovery Experts & Service Company (drivesaversdatarecovery.com)

 

Sorry I can't remember the name of the ppl I used because I sent in via mail and then they held it hostage for a ransom. It was over a decade ago but never doing that again.

 

With what you've described, the most likely issue is the motor that spins the disks or the control arm has crapped out. There's nothing you can do. As has been mentioned, you'll have to use a service. As long as you didn't hear any grinding noises, the data is most likely still safe.

 

There are programs that monitor the health of your drives
to help prevent these situations.

 

You'd be amazed at how often SMART fails to provide warning before sudden failure.

 

I have My Documents and Desktop folders backed up to a Cloud Service - mainly so I can easily access them from other machines. Entire drive images backed up to an external drive. External drive backed up to a pair of other drives I rotate between.

 

I was able to recover a laptop drive about 15 years ago by buying the same drive off ebay, and swapping the disc over very carefully to the working one. I don't know if there are better ways now, but I read about it while searching how to recover data and gave it a try for about $30. It worked. I didn't really learn my lesson from that, and should really do more to backup and protect my data.

 

https://forums.13x.com/index.php?threads/computer-help-ext-hd-recovery.382663/#post-6093955

I remembered this thread from not too long ago - plenty of suggestions here.

 

Seems that way. But they're not cheap. I've contacted a couple of companies so far and both of them are a MINIMUM $300, but can't give an accurate quote until they get the drive to figure out what's wrong, which makes sense. But they said it would be anywhere from $300 to a few thousand! My thought was it's something wrong with the PCB because it's not spinning at all, it's not powering up.

I don't know much about hard drives, but isn't all the data stored on the disk inside? If so, I would think the simplest solution would be to take it out and put it in a working hard drive (which I see Dan Dubeau also mentioned that he did). Is it not as straight forward as that? Only problem I see with that is they are very fragile so there's a risk of messing it up in the process, and then it's done, I lose the data.

 

The largest risk is pretty much what you quoted. However, when companies do this, they do it in a sterile environment. When dealing with magnetic platters, a simple piece of dust landing on it can corrupt that sector of the hard drive data. A newer hard drive often has multiple platters. Your choice on doing that and taking the chance.

 

Yeah I'm in a bit of a dilemma about it because of the cost. Everything has a price (or value) and I need to really ask myself how much is that data really worth? Going into it I had no idea how much it would cost (and still really don't). If it was sub $200, I would send it in without a doubt. But if it's like $1000, then I'm gonna say bye bye data! lol Nothing on there is really critical, but it'd be nice to have it back. More of an inconvenience.

 

It's not quite that simple. You'd have to have the same model hard drive, with the same hardware revision, firmware revision and it would have to be pretty close on the sector mapping. Sometimes you get lucky but if the data is important I wouldn't try that route.

 

I had one years ago that went bad and you could hear it wasn’t really spinning the drive platters up. I pulled off the hard drive cover and gave it a spin with my fingers and it kept spinning. I was able to get the few files I needed off.

That was in the days of 5.25 hard drives, with multiple platters inside the drive.

I’m an idiot and haven’t checked if my backups are even working any more? I need to get on that again.