Hard Dive Disc Oroblem

[whiskeryron]

My daughter,s Mac computer hard drive has gone belly up,she has fitted a new hard drive but cannot get her very important course work off the old h/d we have tried to run the old h/d in an external hard drive but it would not recognise it. Do any of you techies know of a way to get the info off the old h/d.?

[TTG]

Seal the drive in a freezer bag (this is a must to avoid condensation) and put in freezer for 24 hours. Take out and quickly connect using external hard drive enclosure. It might come to life just long enough to copy data from it.

As i said before, the drive MUST be airtight in the bag.

[Hymie]

Adding to TTG’s post, this trick worked for me (bringing a drive back to life), but my PC wanted the drive formatting.

I formatted the drive and used recovery software to search the drive for lost files. Contrary to what you might think, formatting a drive will not erase all the data on the drive – even though your operating system will see the drive as empty. Download.com is a good source of recovery freeware.

Alternatively there are companies that will attempt data recovery from a dead hard drive, but expect to pay upwards of £1,000.

It must make a change for teachers, rather than ‘the dog ate my homework’, ‘my hard drive failed’ must be a common excuse for failure to submit homework/course work on time. Your daughter has learnt a valuable lesson about backing up work. My PC has two separate hard drives, I regularly copy important files to the slave drive, and burn to CD every few months.

[whiskeryron]

Thanks to you both,however,I have now discovered that my daughter took professional advice & was told that the data was not recoverable & she has since dumped the faulty h/d. She has as you state Hymie '' learnt a valuable lesson'' in retrospect.

[Hymie]

Since it is possible to recover the drive (as outlined above), whenever you discard a hard drive (faulty or not) – you should always take a hammer and drill to the drive, to ensure all personal data is not recoverable.