Does anyone know about hard drive repair? I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times.

Bridges Loc: Memphis, Charleston SC, now Nazareth PA

I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times. It is frozen. Is there a service that will remove the disk and put it in another housing? I mean at a cost that is affordable. I may have those shots backed up on CDs somewhere in the few hundred of those I have around, but I still would like to see if there is anything on the drive that I don't know about.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Not cheap.
It needs to be done in a clean booth.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Bridges wrote:

I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times. It is frozen. Is there a service that will remove the disk and put it in another housing? I mean at a cost that is affordable. I may have those shots backed up on CDs somewhere in the few hundred of those I have around, but I still would like to see if there is anything on the drive that I don't know about.

What do you mean by frozen?

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

Bridges wrote:

I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times. It is frozen. Is there a service that will remove the disk and put it in another housing? I mean at a cost that is affordable. I may have those shots backed up on CDs somewhere in the few hundred of those I have around, but I still would like to see if there is anything on the drive that I don't know about.

Probably the "old" part tells all. Where would one get a housing and drive motor for one? I would start searching the CDs and hoping. And get an external SSD and use the CDs as a backup backup.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Bridges wrote:

I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times. It is frozen. Is there a service that will remove the disk and put it in another housing? I mean at a cost that is affordable. I may have those shots backed up on CDs somewhere in the few hundred of those I have around, but I still would like to see if there is anything on the drive that I don't know about.

Some old drives were prone to sticking on startup. You may want to try something that worked for me. I would take the drive out, place it on a table, and grab it from the top and give it a couple of quick twists back and forth. The inertia of the platters would release any friction in the bearing and the drive would start up. This worked better with the 5-1/4" drives.

Chances are you CDs are no longer readable, btw.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Bridges wrote:

I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times. It is frozen. Is there a service that will remove the disk and put it in another housing? I mean at a cost that is affordable. I may have those shots backed up on CDs somewhere in the few hundred of those I have around, but I still would like to see if there is anything on the drive that I don't know about.

Define affordable. If you don't even know what you are hoping to find are you really willing to spend as little as a $100 and as much as $2000 to retrieve these images? If there is a mechanical or electrical failure, or other damage, your cost will probably be somewhere in between those extremes, probably closer to the lower price, but still not inexpensive.

melueth Loc: Central Florida

You don't mention the type of housing that surrounds this drive. I recently had a Western Digital external hard drive (MyBook) "crash" and discovered that the typical problem with these devices is the SATA bridge used to connect them to power and your computer. Once that's removed and you place it in a drive dock, you may find that your actual hard drive is perfectly fine, as i did. Just a thought.

armymsg

Louis Rossman in NYC can do it. They have youtube videos showing how it is done.

GLSmith Loc: Tampa, Fl

I used to do field installation/repair etc for U.S. Government agencies. When a hard disk would fail, quite often it held priceless data the users needed...New data that hadnt been backed up that day....In working with factory reps for the various disk drive vendors, we would very carefully remove the circuit board for the failed disk & swap it out with the new disk circuit board. In most cases this is all it was. Head crashes on a disk are a totally different issue. They went to a degauzzing machine then to the crusher.
Disk drive vendors have taken steps over the years to make it increasingly harder to remove circuit boards for disk drives with a threat of "voiding factory warranty" The Governments stance was "We bought it, as it has classified data on it, you'll never get it back", I still have my tool for removing the the boards...The big thing is that circuit boards must match exactly, REV, Version, etc.

Dikdik Loc: Winnipeg, Canada

You likely need to take this to a company that specialises in data recovery; this can be fairly expensive. Check with them first. Don't mess with the drive.

BebuLamar

I don't think anybody would repair the hard drive. There is recovery service that remove the platen and put it on something in order to retrieve the data. After the data is retrieved they would throw away all parts of the old drive. There is nothing worth saving except the data.
I don't think this service is affordable.
Tapping on the drive to get it to start is a good idea. Once you get it started try to copy as much data as you can off it. After you get the data trash the hard drive.

therwol Loc: USA

BebuLamar wrote:

Tapping on the drive to get it to start is a good idea.

Tapping and tilting, as someone else suggested.

By the way, don't try the freezer trick where you bag up your hard drive and put it in your freezer for 12 hours. It has been debunked over and over and may cause irreparable damage.

therwol Loc: USA

Gene51 wrote:

Chances are you CDs are no longer readable, btw.

You won't know if your CD backups are no longer readable until you try to read them. I burned music to CDs as long as 20+ years ago, and they still play fine in my car.

Argus

Your best bet is to check with a data recover service company. In the corporate world we used to send out drives for data recovery all the time for employees that failed to back up their data. It's not cheap with rates from $300/hr. and up. Some firms might have dropped their prices but if I can remember who we used I'll update the post.

Vince68 Loc: Wappingers Falls, NY

Bridges wrote:

I have an old hard drive 364 or 384 gb. It contains some of my earliest digital images -- before I knew about these drives crashing at times. It is frozen. Is there a service that will remove the disk and put it in another housing? I mean at a cost that is affordable. I may have those shots backed up on CDs somewhere in the few hundred of those I have around, but I still would like to see if there is anything on the drive that I don't know about.

If its an electrical issue, ie. fried board or component, I might be able to help. I had a HD that had fried years ago. I found a company in Canada that I sent the board to, and they repaired it. Cost was a little over $100.00. I had to pay shipping both ways. If it is an electrical problem let me know, and if I can find the company info, I will send it to you in a PM.