Technology, Support, and News Forum

[phileysmiley]

The HDD is physically broken.

I know. My heart sank when I realized that was the problem. I also tried running both Advanced File Recovery and Ontrack directly on the camera (what I lost were pictures) since they can also recover deleted files from camera cards. But the problem there is that they can only recover files that were deleted and not written over. Once the files are overwritten they cannot be recovered.

I think the only hope I have of ever recovering those files is if I have the broken HDD physically repaired.

This convo pretty much describes my situation almost exactly. Looks like a common problem. They call it the "click of death":
http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco ... hard-drive

My PC laptop's hard drive made that "bad" clicking noise a few days ago and yesterday afternoon it finally gave up. I figured out how to put the drive into one of those external USB drives. But I can't seem to read it?

Exactly what I did. Although it does read mine to a point before the clicking starts up and it errors out. Someone recommends whacking it on a desk, another putting it in a freezer, and others say those methods might have worked 10 years ago but not on modern laptop HDDs. There are a dozen different solutions in that thread. But this seems to be the bottom line:

There are service that will recover your hard dirve for somewhere between $300 and $1,200. Sorry to drop that on you but they usually succeed. It's a mechanical problem normally, and they can remove the medium and install it on a new transport medium, as long as the read-write head hasn't taken a nosedive into the surface and destroyed it.

I did call someone at the time and was quoted a price over $1000. If the problem was just being able to access the files it wouldn't be a problem. I can actually see all the files on the drive. It only starts clicking after awhile. But the files I need are on a formatted drive, so the recovery program needs to at least be able to scan the whole formatted partition before it can even begin to recover the files, and the physical drive won't spin correctly for the amount of time needed to run the scan.

[JabbaPapa Profile]

Happened to me once, and I was enough of an IT n00b that I didn't look into data recovery software, and anyway Internet was still in relative infancy and PROnet didn't even exist at the time to find any help

[phileysmiley]

Happened to me once, and I was enough of an IT n00b that I didn't look into data recovery software, and anyway Internet was still in relative infancy and PROnet didn't even exist at the time to find any help

Arrggghh. Well, I'm sure glad PROnet is here now. Although I haven't been able to fix this I did get an external HDD enclosure which, although it turned out to be money I didn't need to spend, may come in handy someday. Man, do I have perfectly good but useless (to me) hardware sitting around!

But without people like you here I certainly wouldn't have been able to solve many problems I've had.