My laptop HDD gave up the ghost yesterday. Initially I wasn't so worried because it gave me an excuse to upgrade from my old 320GB 5400rpm drive to a 750GB 7200rpm 16MB cache drive... but I've realised that I've now lost my save games, including a completed Mass Effect 2 save, 80 hours on The Last Remnant and more. I've connected the old drive via a USB caddy, and the partition isn't even detected, and you can hear the drive struggling. Are there any applications that can extract the data from this drive?
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Extract data from dead HDD
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I can recommend Spinrite. Bit of a pain as it is DOS based so a bootable USB stick or CD is needed and you might have to connect it back up to a PC/Laptop but it will get a drive working 99% of the time. You can also try the ziplok bag/freezer trick if there are only a few small files needed.
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At work we use http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It's pretty straight forward and flexible - you can use it while the disk is attached by usb caddy. I've recovered more than a few disks in this way, even ones with completely fubared file systems.
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If you are not au fait with current HDD tech this is a nice analogy.
If you scale a hard drive to the size of a 747, it's like flying the 747 1/100 of an inch off the ground at 2,500,000 miles per hours, with the pilot able to read the spots on a set of dominos.
And that was in 2006.
A single bit of dust is enough the totally wreck a HDD.
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Originally posted by speedlolita View PostYou could also swap the platters inside the HDD with that of an identicle drive. More expensive option but if it's your drive arm that's screwed you'll have a fully working drive again.
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