Since my last post on the subject, SpinRite has done about all it can do on this poor excuse for a hard drive. It has managed to salvage an awful lot of what would have otherwise been damaged beyond recovery. There were so many borderline “is it a one or a zero?” sectors I got bored watching after 5 hours and went to bed. But it also failed to read an awful lot, even after 2,000 successive attempts on each. Unfortunately when there is no magnetic media left to read (because the hard disk head has smashed into the platter and scraped it off), it doesn’t matter how many millions of times you try, you still won’t get a reply.

So step 2 was to then remove the drive from his PC, freeze it in the chest freezer for 3 hours (in a freezer bag with dessicant packs), and let it cool. Once that was completed I added it to my main work rig, disabled XP automatic CHKDSK in the Registry, and booted the PC with his as a slave on the secondary channel. Once my OS was loaded, I set GetDataBack for NTFS on it. 2 hours later I have a pretty good recovery tree available.

So far as I can tell, I’ve (after several read attempts) been able to salvage most, if not all of those precious family photos. I’m not sure what else is on there that is worth salvaging, so I’m going to create an image of the entire drive. If my friend decides there’s anything else he wants off of it, I can go back and do it without fearing the old drive might not take a second round and fail absolutely.

UPDATE 1: Just as I was about to recover another directory, GDB crashed. I’ve had to rescan the entire drive but so far, the drive isn’t playing. I think it may have sung its last song. I’m going to freeze it again and hope for 3rd time lucky. I only managed to suck off 14GB of photos before it died

UPDATE 2: After much cajouling and freezing, I have recovered just about everything on the drive with the exception of about 100 photos and a handful of corrupted document files. It seems the majority of the platter damage has hit the actual Windows system files and program directories which is a result. I put SeaTools on I’d frozen the drive again; it began repairing and remapping sectors but then it had a heart attack and crashed the PC. After a hard reboot, the drive wasn’t spinning up. Then it did spin up briefly, made a sound similar to “BzzzzzzCRUNCH!” and then died completely. RIP. 15 DVD’s later, my friend now has a complete archive of his hard drive including his entire iTunes collection and thousands upon thousands of family photos. Result!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.