Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
From: Traci N Thrash
I hope you have good luck on your data recovery. Usually, the first thing I do is to pray, then
scold the user GENTLY for not making backups. I hope they never ask to see MY backups.
1. Pull the disk. Put it in a known working machine. This gets you out of the malfunctioning
environment and into a controlled space, YOUR workbench.
2. Try "Auto config" to set the drive type.
3. If "Auto config" does not find the correct drive type, you have two options:
• Read the actual specs off the drive label (this may or may not work, depending upon whether
the setup tech used them or not).
• Use a disk utility to read the specs off of the drive.
4. If this does not work, is the drive spinning?
• If not, try to "shock" it by setting it flat upon the table top, applying power, and rapping it on
the side a couple of times with a plastic-faced hammer or handle of a screwdriver. Don't be
afraid to rap it pretty good, these little guys are pretty sturdy nowadays, and worst case...you
already have a broken drive! (Often you will hear the drive spin up immediately.) Time to
BACK UP (Grab the data and run).
• If it is spinning, power it down and clean the connector with the cleaner of your choice. I like
premoistened alcohol prep pads from a medical supply. Put the cables back on and try again.
5. Sometimes, it helps to remove the PC board from the drive and reinstall it. (Connector
problem again.)
6. Disk utilities like
SpinRite (
http://grc.com/spinrite.htm
),
R Studio
from R-TT
are useful (but
only if the drive is actually spinning.) In every case, back up the data the minute you see
anything that even looks like a directory. Have a drive ready to put it on. I like to have a disk
drive connected to my test machine and put everything there ASAP. You might be advised to
use the "new" drive that will go into the user's machine. Don't put the "bad" drive back unless
you just like to make service calls over again. These steps have made me a hero more than
once on my 17 years as a PC tech and/or salesman. Hope they work for you.
From: Geoff G.
Here's my solution to the quiz "How do you bring a hard drive back to life?"
In order to make the best use of a drive that may be failing, one could take the following
steps:
1. Check the system to see if the drive will detect and boot up successfully. If so, skip to step 5
for backup/data retrieval procedures.
2. If the drive is not detecting properly on the system, check to see if the problem can be
solved in the systems bios, by either manually reconfiguring the drive, or by autodetecting it.
If this works, skip to 5. 3. If the drive simply will not work in that system, try putting it in
another system that is working properly with a similar hard drive (the same drive type and/or
size if possible). If the drive works in this system, but not in the original system, then perhaps
the old system has more serious problems such as a bad IDE controller.
4. Try booting up on the drive. If it will not boot properly, try FDISK or some other partition
viewer to see if it has valid partitions defined. If no valid partitions are defined, or if partitions
are unformatted, then the data may be lost. Try redefining to the exact same partitions that
were known to exist before the problems were encountered. If you have a working drive at this
