Okay the PSU in my new rig went kaploooyeee and smoked out on me. Not to big a deal right? WRONG wired together the old system to limp along with and found out that when the PSU went it took my back-up harddrive with it! I haven't been able to afford to get any media to make hard copies for a long time so everything is GONE.

Any Ideas on recovering data from a drive that will not spin up?

You should've made a backup... but no more of that anyways.

You can look up for a hard drive salvager company and ask to recover it.

But it'll cost you $$$.

I think the way that the salvager company does it is to buy a new hard drive identicle to the one that got trashed, opens the HDD up, retrieves the disk from the inside, replaces it to go in the new HDD.

But this solution may only work if the disk that got trashed is not broken.

I know that backup is a pain in the a** but losing everything gets speech-less so next time you should do it.

Good Luck man

well, if you have *some* money, go buy an identical drive to the one you think is toast. And I mean IDENTICAL in every way.

Then swap the fried circuit board on the old drive with the new, working board from the new drive.

Hopefully, that will 'fix' the drive long enough to get your data off.

Now put the circuit card back onto the new drive. Get that drive working in the new machine.

Toss the old drive and circuit board.

Edited September 16, 200520 yr by newsposter

Sounds sad but I couldn't afford blanks for backup.

Ive had this work before. Try wrapping it in Paper towel, put in ziplock baggie (unclosed to let moisture out) then pop it in freezer for about 3-4 hours. Take out of freezer and plug in to computer frozen. Some times when a HDD gets too hot it will fuse the heads to the disks. What this does, if the drive still powers up but wont spin, is makes the disks srink a little and beaks the heads free. Like i said, it worked for me before.

Edited September 16, 200520 yr by Rosebud6

Ive had this work before. Try wrapping it in Paper towel, put in ziplock baggie (unclosed to let moisture out) then pop it in freezer for about 3-4 hours. Take out of freezer and plug in to computer frozen. Some times when a HDD gets too hot it will fuse the heads to the disks. What this does, if the drive still powers up but wont spin, is makes the disks srink a little and beaks the heads free. Like i said, it worked for me before.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

rofl that sounds so dodgy id try it for a laugh

Sorry to hear your loss though, first rule of WPI is backup, the second rule of WPI is backup !!

i've heard a lot of people saved by rosebud's method by the way, def worth a try

Yeah...the freezer trick does work...at least for me, I've tried it about ten times and it's worked about 33% of the time.

Too bad on the drive...does it even power up anymore? Is it clicking? Does the BIOS say it's screwed?

If it powers up and it's not clicking, then you have a good chance of salvaging data without needed to spend thousands...yes, thousands...of dollars.

If you like, you could send it to me and I'll take a crack at it. I have a ton of software tools from my previous job as an onsite tech that would help out.

I also have a spare 40GB HD, but I can't just give that one away...if you could get together enough to cover the cost + shipping it's yours. Cost of the drive was $40...shipping should be around $5. And I would include some blanks so we don't run into this again.

Oh...I see the last line now...it doesn't spin up...****, that is usually fubar. Unless you try the circuit board replacement idea. What is the drive manufacturer, model, and size?

Also, since the WPI files aren't that big I bet we could setup an online backup system...I have two servers with more than enough space to handle that, I could make you some upload scripts even if you can't be bothered with manually uploading via FTP.

Not truly all is lost I found some old backups and a new version of WPI was just released so no lost work on WPI. However I did have a couple of side projects that were new and are gone plus about 10 gigs of music and videos and a good 30 ISO files which will be a complete b***h to replace.

Even so, you should still look into some form of backup for WPI, as the next time you might not be so lucky...my offer still stands for the off-site backup. I have two servers maintained by two seperate companys, so it would be very redundant.

I would like to take you up on the offer.

Excellent...I'll get with you on Monday then and we'll bang that out.

KK...

Gonna get another WD600 and try a platter swap.