hard drive

[luigi49]

Anyone know how I can recover data on a hard drive that is making a whirring noise.  I taught I got all the data I wanted but I still have a few more to recover. 
Thanks

[Insanity]

Google:

lifehacker hard drive disk recovery

There's several options out there depending upon which OS and system you have.  LifeHacker generally gives solid advice.

[randymarsh]

You may want to create a disk image of the entire drive. Then you can restore it to a new drive and browse through it at your leisure. These tools can help: http://lifehacker.com/5303067/five-best-free-system-restore-tools

You could also boot the machine using a Ubuntu live CD and copy the needed files to a flash drive from there.

[gimp]

Clone the hard drive with a block-level copy. Something like

dd if=/path/to/drive of=/path/to/clone -various -options

Then once that's done, you can always recover from there.

[Spork]

+1 to making a dd image.

*IF* the drive is actually failing... meaning actual reads retry and fail... I've had moderate success with sticking it in the freezer for a short amount of time and then re-attempting recovery.  But make an image before you start trying stuff like that.

[luigi49]

Well since it started doing the whirring sound the drive is not even showing. 

[gimp]

If it's not even showing... pretty much freezer trick. Remember to double bag it in ziplock bags. You will only have 5-10 minutes if it even works.

If your data is critical, you might want it professionally recovered. This is EXPENSIVE.

In the future, backups are required.

[Spork]

I've even wired the disk such that the disk sat in the freezer while it was running.

[gimp]

Oh hey that is smart. Good idea.

[luigi49]

No go on the freezer trick.  I tried that yesterday.  Just not reading the hard drive.  I might try wiring it in the freezer like mention here. 

[Spork]

[You've probably already tried this...]

...but if it isn't even seeing the disk from the BIOS... try it many times.  Cycling power over and over....

If the drive is spinning... and you totally cannot see it from the BIOS... it's possible that it's the controller.  If you have access to another disk of the same kind, you might try (LAST RESORT!) pulling the controller off of the bad disk and swapping it with a known good disk.  again: LAST RESORT!

[luigi49]

well I had it hook up to a hard drive enclosure that i attached to a usb slot.  Cannot see it.  It is whirring though. 

[Spork]

note by "controller" ... I mean the printed circuit board that is screwed onto the disk itself (not the controller on the mother board.)  And you'd have to replace it with a controller of exactly the same make/model of disk. 

[sleepyguy]

you may be SOL, but what you can try is putting the HDD in the freezer for about 20mins... then taking it out and attaching it to an external sata (I assume SATA) drive bay and trying to read it off an esata port to offload the data.

mechanically if the drive is dead then you'll have to get professional services to take a look... very very expensive.  This is because they open the HDD in dust free environment and read the platter directly with special equipment.

If you have no clue what i'm talking about most IT shops will do it for a fee... when I did this it was usually about a flat $100 one time fee, but no guarantees on data retrieval.