Crashed hard disk ... please advise

Brian,

A thousand thank you's would not be enough. With over 60 units available, they are bound to have the unit I need.

Anthony,
Re Microdirect.co.uk
Make sure they have the correct Seagate manufacturers no.! I just noticed another glitch on their web site where they list one man.no at the top of the page but in effect are selling a different model. They seem to list your model no. as ST96812A also. I am not sure if they are two different hard drives and are compatible, maybe Seagate can advise on that one or even your local professional data recovery service
I also found your hard drive on German web sites but as my German is useless you will have to find someone to help with translation for you.
Look at all these !
www.hardwareschotte.de/hardware/preise/p...0822A+Momentus+54002

Regards,
Brian

Brian,,

Thanks for the advice and additional info. I have also sent an email to Seagate to see which additional hardwware configurations (ie. drive models) are compatible.

I am really hoping something materializes out of all of this mess.

Hi Anthony,
If you cannot get a matching hard drive,try this software. I have succesfully used Disk Patch to rebuild damaged partitions and recover data. This software is called iRecover and is made by the same company as Disk Patch. Again there is a trial version which can take hours to rebuild the file system on a hard drive and then only allows you to save one folder. However this software also has a free mode which states

# The iRecover trial version allows you to recover the contents of one folder each time you run it. There are no file size limitations! (Also see file validation below)

# In digital image recovery mode, iRecover operates as freeware with no functional limitations. Recover lost or deleted digital photos, images, pictures and multimedia from all types of digital media including digital cameras, SmartMedia, CompactFlash, Sony Memory Sticks, IBM Micro Drives, Flash cards, harddisk, and others.

It could be worth downloading the trial version and seeing if the mode known as "Digital Image Recovery mode" can actually find your lost photos. No harm at this stage.

www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm

Brian
PS Why do the data recovery specialists need to recover your data to an exact copy of your hard drive? I have recovered files from a broken hard drive to a completely different model before with no problems.

Anthony - I hope this is going in the right direction for you.

After a similar situation a few months back, I can empathise.

I recommend (as I did) you seriously consider upgrading your PC to include either some kind of backup system or RAID.

Personally, I found backing up a pain and I'd forget (I know there is software but it didn't help me much). So, I have just bought a whole new PC and have RAID 10 working away quite nicely. As it happens, we had a power cut this evening - and on a power up, the RAID system kicked in, checked the volume and fixed all errors. Just like that!

With the price of hard-disks being cheap, I went for four 500 GB disks which gives me a 1 terabyte RAID 10 volume and complete peace of mind.

Consider it and avoid this pain again...

Dave

Hi Anthony,

As previously stated, don't try to do anything with this drive while you have it connected via USB.
The best way to recover anything is with the IDE connection, if your PC doesn't have a dual IDE controller just use the one on your CD or DVD drive.

One other recovery utility I have found to be good is OnTrack, it should be able to recover your data.

I would also offer to try to recover your data for you, I've been working in the It industry for nearly 20 years and have come up against this problem more than once, and have had a great deal of success.

Best of luck !!