Extracting Files From Damaged Drive

[smary]

Is it possible to retrieve the files from a damage external hard drive.  The drive doesn't show up on my pc or may laptop so assuming its had it.

[alchresearch]

Possibly.  Can you hear or feel it spinning up?

 

[smary]

I've had someone look at it and he says theres no hope.  Very disappointed but to be honest I can't remember all the stuff thats on there so I can't miss it can I.

I havent checked to see if its making a noise - no it isnt making any noise.

[tzijlstra]

There are specialist companies out there for real crises, which charge a pretty penny. So realistically, yes, but only at very high cost. I've worked somewhere that lost a drive on a server with a big ongoing project on it, the backup had failed some time before without the sysadmin realising. We got it repaired for over 300 euros.

[13court2]

is there a way of extracting the raw data from the platters if I remove them?

I used to do it with floppies and then rebuild the data, but I'm not sure if there's hardware out there that you could put a bare platter into.

any help anyone!!

[stimpy]

do not open the drive up.

 

if its an external usb drive that is still spinning up, maybe try shucking the drive and putting it into a pc to see if it can be accessed. Then depending on the recovery software it may get recognised that way.

 

does it spin up? clicking noise? etc etc

[13court2]

already been opened by various data recovery services but they failed to get it to be recognised by the os, so I transplanted the heads from a doner drive, still no joy.

the platters are just magnetic media so I thought there would be some kind of contraption that would read the raw data, if I could extract this raw data then I could rebuild the directories and files