I need advice for recovering a hard-drive? please read!

[iloveit]

About half a year ago I realized that my external hard-drive that I bought on amazon was malfunctioning, I had noticed there was a connection problem even before that, it would connect and disconnect rapidly sometimes, but I didn't think much of it cause my files were still there. then 1 day I tried to open my files which had saved in there (video files), and they couldn't open, but it wasn't just like a straight-right-away error message--it was loading and loading, like there was something there, it just couldn't open, and when I tried to “safely remove hardware” It would not allow me to, even with all windows closed it would say “please close programs using the drive”.. I had to just pull the USB out. I unplugged and re-plugged it several times, to see if I could find a way to open the files (and I tried everything like moving the file to C drive to open, or using a different computer, nothing worked)... every-time I tried the files appeared differently, like sometimes it would just not be there, (actually every time the folder would come up empty at first), sometimes there'd only be like half of them, and then the rest would load, but then there wouldn't be the names or thumbnails, sometimes just the names not the thumbnails, sometimes names and thumbnails, but not dates or info, sometimes there was everything included accept it wouldn't play... it would open the video player and the video player would load a bit and then would give up.. My hard drive seems like it has Alzheimer’s and it is having trouble pulling up different parts of the file but I am sure there is a way to recover the files because I know it’s in there somewhere, the data wasn’t wiped, I think it just doesn't know how to use the data to play the video because the video is somehow corrupted ...

I want to get the drive recovered, but I most importantly don't want to give the drive to someone who hooks it up to a computer and unsuccessfully tries a whole lot of things to recover the data, and then after all that the drive may self-destruct even more and make the problem even harder to solve… I feel that every-time the drive is powered on, it’s probably somehow screwing itself up even more, Plus the whole issue with the unstable connection (which is what I believe caused the malfunction in the first place) will probably find a way to screw it up further.. So before anyone tries to recover the data with a computer, I want to have the drive completely cloned, but I don't know how that can be done, I am thinking I could buy the exact same model and then ask a hardware expert to scan the drive with a machine and clone the data onto the other drive, it might even be better to have 2 or 3 other cloned drives just to be safe… The last thing I want is to pay some guy at the data recovery company to F up the drive permanently, if that happens then I can’t even bring it to a real good data recovery expert..

In the future when I have more money I’d want to hire like a real smart computer expert, who is smart and creative, someone who treats data recovery like Sherlock Holmes treats crime solving, treating every situation differently, not following a procedure... I don't trust the 9-5 working people in a data recovery company who don’t really care about your data because they’re still getting paid at the end of the day. Right now though, I have not much money and I can't wait forever because I hear that hard-drives lose their magnetic energy if not powered on for a while, and it could lose your data even after a year of sitting in storage, I don't want that to happen. I feel that I can't wait any longer; these files are so incredibly important to me, I can't afford to lose them. They are like all I worked on for many years. So, please tell me, what would you do? How would you handle this? Thanks for reading & Thanks for any advice or help.

(P.S. I have about 1,500 USD saved up and that's all I'm going to have for a good while, I have no job because I am disabled but I won't get into that... so what would you do, if you had 1,500 dollars and broken drive?)

Again I really appreciate any replies, even If you are not an expert.. I am posting this on like 12 other forums so any reply is helpful even if you don't know much. Thanks.

[CrazyTeeka]

First thing to do is stop pluging drive in and powering it up. Don't worry. The drive won't lose it's magnetic's for a long time. Your in good hands with Recovery Force. Good data recovery services have the right tools and know how. You have to be sure who you finally take that drive to must know what they are doing. A good indication of that is they will have one of these tools: RapidSpar, DeepSpar, PC-3000 UDMA, PC-3000 Express. Please do share what the other forums are saying so myself or Recovery Force can check that it's proper advice.

From what you are saying, you want to clone the drive yourself. This is a bad idea on a PC, because a PC expects a drive to just work, when it's unstable, the PC can retry reads hundreds of times, killing the drive more. If you must clone it yourself, you will need a proper tool like the RapidSpar with USB add-on. It has a skip bads mode that greatly reduces the stress on the drive.

Data recovery isn't something you'd need Sherlock Holmes for. Either the data is there or it's not. Drives are repaired in a clean room making them stable enough to clone/image. Once you get your data back, I'd strongly consider doing backups... https://www.backblaze.com

Why do you assume people don't care about your data. I care and I'm very sure Recovery Force does too.

RapidSpar:
http://www.rapidspar.com

Recovery Force on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCytBfl ... bWA/videos

[Joep]

I am with previous poster on this.

During my daily round of forums I noticed your post. I am all for DIY when possible, but in this case ignore ALL advice where people actually prompt you to do something yourself. Even if it is only meant to get a clearer picture of the issue. Because everything you do from now on may worsen the condition of the disk. Which will decrease the chances even a data recovery lab may have. So don't do it specially after how you have indicated how important the data is to you.

This may until now be largely a straight forward job for a data recovery lab with the proper equipment (Like Recovery Force). Let them handle it. They have specialized equipment to clone the disk. And once they have that clone, half the battle is won.

Stop messing around with the disk, let a professional take care of it. The people from recovery Force and many others as well are trustworthy and take your data very seriously.

[lcoughey]

Well, that is quite an essay, to say the least. As the others have said, it is best to avoid powering on the drive and attempting anything DIY, based on what you have written. And, most definitely, ignore any advice by spammers who say, "try my software" and fools who suggest putting the drive in a freezer or running disk repair snake oil programs like SpinRite and HDDRegenerator.

A couple details you left out that would prove helpful are the model and capacity of the hard drive. Knowing the model will help us narrow in on common issues we would see with those drives.

Based on what I can get from your post, it is possible that the drive started with a fault in the electronics. But, with the constant disconnects and the likes, it could be progressing towards a head crash. But, this is purely speculation at this point. If you only have $1500 USD in the bank, you'll definitely want to steer clear of most of the more well known data recovery labs.

If you'd like to send your drive into us at Recovery Force, we'd be most happy to take a look. If all goes well, we may still be able to recover your data at our base rate for hard drive recoveries (up to 4TB in capacity) for $400 CAD (Current US Exchange).

[iloveit]

Well, that is quite an essay, to say the least. As the others have said, it is best to avoid powering on the drive and attempting anything DIY, based on what you have written. And, most definitely, ignore any advice by spammers who say, "try my software" and fools who suggest putting the drive in a freezer or running disk repair snake oil programs like SpinRite and HDDRegenerator.

A couple details you left out that would prove helpful are the model and capacity of the hard drive. Knowing the model will help us narrow in on common issues we would see with those drives.

Based on what I can get from your post, it is possible that the drive started with a fault in the electronics. But, with the constant disconnects and the likes, it could be progressing towards a head crash. But, this is purely speculation at this point. If you only have $1500 USD in the bank, you'll definitely want to steer clear of most of the more well known data recovery labs.

If you'd like to send your drive into us at Recovery Force, we'd be most happy to take a look. If all goes well, we may still be able to recover your data at our base rate for hard drive recoveries (up to 4TB in capacity) for $400 CAD (Current US Exchange).

thanks for the reply,
on the label I see different numbers, there's a 6 digit code with 3 letters and 3 numbers, there's a P/N there's a S/N and then some other things but I think the model number is probably one of those 3, do you know which?
"steer clear of most of the more well known data recovery labs": why steer clear? are the more well known ones worse?

[iloveit]

First thing to do is stop pluging drive in and powering it up. Don't worry. The drive won't lose it's magnetic's for a long time. Your in good hands with Recovery Force. Good data recovery services have the right tools and know how. You have to be sure who you finally take that drive to must know what they are doing. A good indication of that is they will have one of these tools: RapidSpar, DeepSpar, PC-3000 UDMA, PC-3000 Express. Please do share what the other forums are saying so myself or Recovery Force can check that it's proper advice.

From what you are saying, you want to clone the drive yourself. This is a bad idea on a PC, because a PC expects a drive to just work, when it's unstable, the PC can retry reads hundreds of times, killing the drive more. If you must clone it yourself, you will need a proper tool like the RapidSpar with USB add-on. It has a skip bads mode that greatly reduces the stress on the drive.

Data recovery isn't something you'd need Sherlock Holmes for. Either the data is there or it's not. Drives are repaired in a clean room making them stable enough to clone/image. Once you get your data back, I'd strongly consider doing backups... https://www.backblaze.com

Why do you assume people don't care about your data. I care and I'm very sure Recovery Force does too.

RapidSpar:
http://www.rapidspar.com

Recovery Force on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCytBfl ... bWA/videos

thank you for the reply, I have gotten many replies on other forums, most of them giving DYI answers, I searched a bunch of forums and made accounts for them, most were not forums for a recovery company so I apologize for calling the companies untrustworthy, I don't know much but I just had a feeling that many companies will just want to get your drive and give it back as quick as possible because they get paid whether or not the drive gets fixed, but maybe I just am wrong. I am just scared that's all, I don't feel safe...

[iloveit]

I am with previous poster on this.

During my daily round of forums I noticed your post. I am all for DIY when possible, but in this case ignore ALL advice where people actually prompt you to do something yourself. Even if it is only meant to get a clearer picture of the issue. Because everything you do from now on may worsen the condition of the disk. Which will decrease the chances even a data recovery lab may have. So don't do it specially after how you have indicated how important the data is to you.

This may until now be largely a straight forward job for a data recovery lab with the proper equipment (Like Recovery Force). Let them handle it. They have specialized equipment to clone the disk. And once they have that clone, half the battle is won.

Stop messing around with the disk, let a professional take care of it. The people from recovery Force and many others as well are trustworthy and take your data very seriously.

Thanks for the advice, I'm glad I posted to this forum because mostly everyone was telling me DYI methods...

[iloveit]

I am with previous poster on this.

During my daily round of forums I noticed your post. I am all for DIY when possible, but in this case ignore ALL advice where people actually prompt you to do something yourself. Even if it is only meant to get a clearer picture of the issue. Because everything you do from now on may worsen the condition of the disk. Which will decrease the chances even a data recovery lab may have. So don't do it specially after how you have indicated how important the data is to you.

This may until now be largely a straight forward job for a data recovery lab with the proper equipment (Like Recovery Force). Let them handle it. They have specialized equipment to clone the disk. And once they have that clone, half the battle is won.

Stop messing around with the disk, let a professional take care of it. The people from recovery Force and many others as well are trustworthy and take your data very seriously.

May I ask, how can you clone the HDD? like, would you literally strip everything down to just the disk and then use your own needle or whatever to read it? or like, how far would you strip it down? because someone mentioned to me that It could be encoded or something, and there is "firmware" which could have been part of the malfunction, and the only way to recover the data is to get the exact same model external hard drive, and insert the old HHD or a cloned HHD into the new product, Is that something you could do, or do often?

[iloveit]

ok I found the model number: HDTC910XR3AA

[CrazyTeeka]

I'd suggest opening a backblaze backup account and start backing up your existing data, after the recovery is done you'll have somewhere to backup that data too. Print off an info sheet with backblaze's username and password for emergency data restores as needed.

The "Freezer Trick" actually damages the drive more, when a drive is frozen then thawed, it becomes flooded inside, like frozen ice melting. When the drive is powered on the drive heads are rapidly pushing through that flooding, think of a car driving through a flooded road not once, but 50 times a second.

Spinrite was a crazy idea by a guy who was very good at marketing, on modern computers it's too unstable now. It was never intended for use on anything less than a healthy drive at best, and gave up too easy on unstable drives, while claiming to be magical. Never use SpinRite.

Who in their right mind would make software that writes data back to a failing drive. Had it worked similar to say a RapidSpar, it might have been a whole different matter. It should of done proper drive imaging and remote backup.

There is no magic needle. The drive has to be repaired first. This could mean one or all of the following fixes...

Working head stack from a matching donor drive (when heads are bad).
Platter transplant to another drive case (when spindle is jammed up good).
PCB swap from donor drive with ROM chip from original drive. (when PCB has failed).

Never open a drive that needs important data off it, unless it's done in a clean room or laminar flow bench, these are expensive.
Never ever open a helium filled drive yourself, that would kill it right away.

I don't work for Recovery Force and use the RapidSpar, but that only works in some cases.
Recovery Force would have more tools: RapidSpar, DeepSpar, PC-3000, Laminar Flow Bench (mini clean room), a library of donor drives ready to go.

While I am a DIY data recovery guy (helping friends and family), I know what I'm doing, I know when a case is beyond the tools I have.