Question:
Data Recovery Help - Are there any DIY tricks that may help?Answer:
Some disks may not need data recovery service. Learn more about some simple do-it-yourself data recovery and preliminary checking before you consider full-fledge data recovery service by the professionals.The followings are some generic "tricks" but could potentially damage your drive further. They are meant for situations whereby there is no severe hardware failure and you know what you are doing. You must be aware that by following such tricks, you could risk losing your data forever. Please do not attempt any such homebrew recovery methods if your data is valuable. In some cases, the more you attempt recovery on a failed drive, the more difficult it is for a professional data recovery company to recover your data.
- Verify that the jumpers, power cables, IDE (or SCSI) cables are firmly seated and are in good conditions.
- If the drive is not spinning (Neither do you feel any vibration, nor any spinning sound), try:
- Clean contacts between board and motor using anti-static cloth.
- Check that nothing (especially the casing) is short-circuiting the electronic board of the drive
- swap the circuit board if you have exact match of the model and firmware. Please be very careful here. For certain disk models, swapping boards of different firmware will corrupt data and render the situation unrecoverable. In situation whereby there is a combination of board and R/W head failure, such action will further damage the platter. In case of doubt, do not try especially if the data is important to you
- Check for loose power cables. Measure the voltage to see 5V and 12V are present.
- If the drive chirps and refuses to spin up, try to place the drive in a vertical position and tap the drive firmly (without excessive force). This will only work if there is a slight Read-Write head "stiction". If the situation is real "sticky", you probably need to send the disk to a data recovery professional to avoid damaging the platter.
- We hear one popular "cool trick" mentioned by some news group. They suggest putting the disk into a freezer overnight. However, there is real danger that when you take up the drive, water get condensed on the internal platter and this will cause imminent disk failure. We advise against this.
- Scan disk is something that you should usually avoid if you feel that this could be hardware related failure. Scan disk will only fix minor logical corruption and when the number of bad sectors is small and not too severe.
Once I read a news article when some one had accidentally done a format. One guy suggested to the poor victim to "unformat" it by issuing the command "format /u". It is quite a joke but the point to drive home is you should take the advises from knowledgeable people and attempt the recovery carefully.
