Dead hard drive brought back to life

Hard disks always go wrong eventually - they come with MTBF ratings, that's Mean Time Before Failure Between Failures. The manufacturer just knows that one day all that data is going away and not coming back. They're like lightbulbs, but less predicatable. That's why it's such a good idea to make backups, and preferably offsite. Then when your hard disk goes tits up, you'll feel smug, rather than homicidal.
If you've worked with computers for any length of time, you'll probably have had the task of recovering data from a 'dead' hard disk. Maybe your own, maybe a friends, maybe the business next door. I've had a few to deal with over the years and in all the situations, all the important data was recoverable without calling in professional services. Usually it's just a question of loading up some file recovery software, scanning the disk for files that are intact and copying them to a new drive. But here's something more involved - the electronics in this guy's drive were totally fried but rather than give up on it, he got a drive of exactly the same model and used it for parts to get the old drive working again. That's great geek heroics. The attitude with most electronics is that it's easier and cheaper to replace rather than to repair and that's pretty wasteful. But that attitude doesn't work well with hard disks when there's all that data resting on it.

Posted by Alexander at August 5, 2005 11:36 PM

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Comments

Quick tip: I've just used this program, GetDataBack, to recover files from a problem drive. If you're having problems with a hard disk - I recommend it - it can recover files from a drive that the system won't recognize.
http://www.runtime.org/

Posted by: Alexander McCabe at March 26, 2006 03:31 PM

ddrescue is also good for recovering data

Posted by: Anonymous at April 18, 2006 08:14 PM

MY HARDDISK IS NOT DITECTING . I NEED THE DATA'S IN MY HARDDISK. WHAT I WANT TO DO . HOW IT WAS RECTIFIED.

Posted by: Saravanakumar.G at October 31, 2008 05:37 AM

Do you have appplication to recovery or maintenance dead hard drive,my hard drive was not detect on windows,but bios can reading it...please send mail to me if you have any aplication for it,thankz.

Posted by: Harriesta at January 6, 2009 01:39 PM