Hey my friends, So one of my desktops took a dive, I had trouble getting into Windows desktop (sometimes I could, others not). I took it to a place that I go to that actually recycles PC's, mostly from large businesses but they do cater to individuals. The guy told me my HD was "shot", but as I said I was able to get into windows intermittently and got into BIOS easily, I wonder if I can still retrieve my files? I do backups but I hadn't saved a few months of family photos etc that I'd like to get back. Any chance the data can be recovered and if so, will it cost me a small fortune to do it? If I wasn't clear, I never heard any physical damage, in fact, the PC was too quiet, I never even heard the fans or drive spinning up, so I'm "suspicious" that I simply had viruses or similar issues Thanks much
there is a plethora of free and paid data recovery programs out there.ive never seen much success with free or paid.if you really value these photos there are data recovery outfits but they are tres expensive.
Place it in a usb caddy & extract .Only other way is another hdd that's the same size & model & have a data recovery crowd switch out the faulty electrical parts so the platters can be accessed
You can still enter into bias with a bad drive if it's still somewhat accessible. What I do is keep a bootable copy of Linux Mint on a 64 GB thumb drive as a kind of emergency drive backup. The benefit is if my main drive dies, I can still boot into it even with a dead hard disk, and order computer parts online. A year ago last summer hurricane Irma caused a rapid series of multiple power surges that killed my old computer including including two hard drives. The main drive is always the first to die. So using the USB Linux back up I was able to piece together a working computer out of old parts and order new parts online. So how does that help you? If you can get access to a large thumb drive (mines 64 GB), a copy of Linux mint, and copy of an application called Rufus, and make a bootable USB drive then you can use it to access your hatched drive. Just keep your hatched drive installed, but when boot choose boot menu and then boot into your live USB drive, when its up, then go to "computer" and see if your drive is listed. If it's listed then try to access it and if you can then copy and paste the files you're trying to save to your Mint Linux desktop USP drive. If you can't access it then it's too far gone for anyone but someone who specializes in drive recovery.
I will look up a usb caddy and try, thanks, ironically I have a second identical desktop I gave to my boy, so it doesn't have anything I care about losing...the only thing about "plan B" is I've been told the data folks charge like $300 which is more than I can burn on this endeavor. Strange thing this time is I've killed more than my share of desktops in my day (I drive them all till they drop) and every single one I could hear unwelcome sounds (screeching, grinding etc), this "dead" HD did not make a sound, I could get into BIOS and almost Windows desktop before the error. It was acting like a wicked virus, not a dead HD, but I didn't know what to try from BIOS so I brought it to a place I go to sometimes, but I know they put little effort into repairs (their main business is recycling PC's, the "service dept" is just a side-gig for them
Thanks for the valuable info, this may be out of my league as I don't know what Linux is (I've seen it a hundred times, but I don't know Linux. I have a second identical PC (I bought two at the time), would it be worth pulling the HD from the known good one and installing the sketchy HD into the good PC? Is there a definitive test I can run on the questionable HD? This desktop gave no symptoms of failing whatsoever, no squealing, one day I'm cleaning up some viruses, the next day I can get into BIOS and almost pulling up the desktop to my pseudo-repair shop telling me the HD is shot...half the time they don't remember I brought one in so.... Thank you
Linux mint is really quite easy to use because it has a Windows like desktop, and the live thumb drive will load all the drivers you need on booting. A live thumb drive is also quite easy to make. You simply download I keep a couple of Linux thumb drives on hand just in case something like what happened to you happens to me. If you have another computer that's still running you could install the wounded drive to it and try and try accessing it as a slave, because I've done that before too with success. I think the important thing to do is not to mess with your drive too much because that might take what little life it has left. When you move a drive from one computer to another you're going to have driver conflicts and the degree of conflict varies from system to system. If for some reason you decide to give Mint a try, here's a link to help get you started. https://www.linuxbuilder.com/produc...rive?msclkid=ef087631f50f1a125a0d2a1bd0d41903 If you download it you will need to mount it as a virtual drive to make it work, and you will need a copy of Rufus to install Linux to the thumb drive and make it bootable. https://rufusdownload.org/https://rufusdownload.org/
