Gentlemen, we have a problem - HD crash, all help welcome!

[DR.Wong]

Okay boys,

Ever seen the movie apollo 13? Well this is similar. We have a life and death problem with limited resources and complete isolation from the real world.

Here's the situation.

I am in a remote part of South Africa.

The business I work for hasn't backed up their Book Keeping and Point of Sale system in ages.

The hard drive has crashed.

The drive goes : ZOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!, click-click, click-click. ZOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!, click-click, click-click.

It does this a few times then gives up.

The OS the machine was running is Ubuntu Linux (Newest release)

The data is stored in a MySQL database on the OS.

The next time someone is coming from a main city where there is a data recovery company is in 5 weeks time.

I HAVE TO get the data out of this drive.

-------------------------------------------------
What we're dealing with :

A Western Digital 40GB hard-drive (quite old)
The drive is ATA
-------------------------------------------------
What's available to us :

1) Another Ubuntu Machine
2) An external case that can be used with this drive
3) An iMac & MacBook Pro both running leopard
4) A windows XP machine
5) A windows vista home premium machine
6) A 1GB flash disk
7) Some CDs and DVDs
8) Some lan cables
9) A cat
10) The internet
11) A cat
12) Lots of tools

-------------------------------------------------
The symptoms :

Aside from the clicking, when a machine running the disk as master boots up it throws up "Disk boot failure, insert system disk".

The drive, when in the external case, does not mount on OS X nor does it appear in Disk Utility.

When in the other ubuntu machine as slave, it does not appear at all.

The same when placed into the XP machine, nothing in device manager, nothing at all.

The drive does show up on the BIOS setup.

Placing the drive in the freezer for 2 hours did nothing. It just made my hands cold.

The data holds a list of debtors and their totals so it's IMPERATIVE that we get this thing sorted.

That's the story. If you have ANY ideas, anything at all. Please, I'm waiting on baited breath.

You have your mission!

[effpeetee]

Pray, Pray, Pray.

Apollo 13 was a 'piece of cake!'

Stroke the cat for me.

Frank

Oh God our help in ages past.....................

[DR.Wong]

Haha.. thanks frank!

Yeah they didn't have a broken hard drive to deal with.

The cat is grateful..

[effpeetee]

Sorry about that.

But your post was light hearted in spite of your troubles.
I would suggest however that you do not run your hard disk any more. There are ways to recover data, but the more damage that is done to the disk, the less chance there is to recover the data.

Frank.

[bazz]

Placing the drive in the freezer for 2 hours did nothing. It just made my hands cold.


lol.
y'know that reads really funny.

Have you the ability to iuse this bad drive as a d: drive? its a long shot but maybe iof you could use it as a storage drive only - without being the runner of the OS - you might be able to get some data from it.

aside from that I can offer no thoughts except suggest an office policy change for the future IT arrangements.

bazz.

[DR.Wong]

Have you the ability to iuse this bad drive as a d: drive?

Do you mean running the drive as a slave (so the jumper settings are set to "slave")????

If so then I have tried this. As above, it simply does not appear, either in My Computer or Device Manager in XP.

Ubuntu does not see it either.

Thanks for the advice!!!!

[DR.Wong]

Sorry about that.

No apologies frank!!

I think we need a bit of humor :)

I think your advice is wise, I'm only going to run the drive again if there is a good chance of reading the data from it.

Once I get the data I'll burn the blasted thing.

[effpeetee]

Best of luck.

Frank

[AlexV]

I don't think you can do anything about this problem since I think it's a "broken hardware" issue. Probably one of the reading heads that broke. Each time you boot up you PC with that drive plugged in, you can potentially harm the drive even more...

I think youre stuck with data recovery specialist that will physically open the drive and extract the data from it...

Instead of waiting weeks can you send the drive by courrier to the recovery firm or these services aren't available at all in your region?

[oracleguy]

If you executed the freezing trick and it didn't work, you are SOL on your own.

If you send the drive out to a recovery agency they can probably get your data back but it won't be cheap by any means.

[DR.Wong]

Well...

At the end of the day, we found a backup from 30 January.

The manager's gonna see if he can work with it.

Contacted a company in Johannesburg a lil earlier.

They want R4000.00 (That's about $400).

If he can't re-do the data, looks like it's going to be a pricy endeavor.

There's a life lesson here I'm sure has just been learnt the hard way by el' capitan over here.

BACK UP OR DIE.

Thanks for the input everyone!

I'm gonna stick the drive in the freezer again bazz. See if it does more than make my hands cold... haha

[Apostropartheid]

You may also want to look into RAIDs. This is by no means a backup solution, but is very much advised to avoid crippling hard disk failures.

[Corwin]

I have only heard of this an not tried it, it may not work or it might even be risky, but:

Assuming the Platters in the HD are in good/perfect shape, and some other component of the drive is broken. buy a new drive, similar if not same model, open both up, and replace the platters of the new drive with the ones of the old drive, make sure not to mark the surface of the platters with anything (use gloves?)

i have removed platters from HDs before, it is easy with the right tools (10 minutes), but just for fun, never tried sticking them into a new drive.

[bazz]

I'm gonna stick the drive in the freezer again bazz. See if it does more than make my hands cold... haha

no need for you to get into it too :D

bazz

[oracleguy]

I have only heard of this an not tried it, it may not work or it might even be risky, but:

Assuming the Platters in the HD are in good/perfect shape, and some other component of the drive is broken. buy a new drive, similar if not same model, open both up, and replace the platters of the new drive with the ones of the old drive, make sure not to mark the surface of the platters with anything (use gloves?)

i have removed platters from HDs before, it is easy with the right tools (10 minutes), but just for fun, never tried sticking them into a new drive.

That can work however it is ideally done in a clean room because even one spec of dust on the platters or heads and it won't work right.