My girlfriend was using my external HDD and decided to balance it on a little alarm clock, well of course it fell and now it makes a two grinding beeps immediatley after turn-on and every three or four seconds after that it makes the same two grinding beeps. It is a western digital WD Caviar 2500, 250 Gb. Now here is the sad part, ALL of my pics from my laptop are on there because about a month ago i reformated it and used this HDD as the back-up and didnt have time to put the pics back on my laptop. This HDD has many priceless pics of my good party years and now they are stuck or maybe even lost. SAD SAD.


Is there any kind of place that specialized in removing data from damaged hard drives?

I'm thinking i can maybe find a identical hdd and swap the disks then maybe i can acsess the data, but that is probably easier said than done.


Thanks Alot.

yes there are definitly places that can recover data from a hard drive that is actually physically damaged. Government agencies use these services a lot for evidence etc etc.... How expensive it may be to recover these files I dunno, but i think a good place to start would be like a Geek Squad or something, and maybe they could lead you in the right direction

Ouch not good.... You can get them repaired but it generally cost thousands of dollars depending on the damage. I had one fail like this on me a few weeks back because the data was not important ( I know this sounds bad ) I slamed the side of it on the desk with resonable force and it started working I think the heads where stuck any way I recovered the data but I no longer use it just incase.

well maybe i can try the old slam technique, but i did find a place that said it would be 500$ for a data recovery and if they couldn't find the data it would be no charge, but i might just wait and see if a better deal comes up. I'm just not ready to try the slam technique just yet.

Thanks

The only other thing you could do is when the drive is plugged in and spinning make sure it is on a flat surface and half spin it left and right a few times to try get the heads unjammed. But the $500.00 option is a good price and no data no pay this is good what company is it?


I know this sound stupid but it actully has worked for me in the past....

Put the hard drive into a freezer. Yes you heard right, into a freezer (for about 15 minutes, although some people find better results after 12 hours), this can "unstick" the heads and temporarily get the hard drive working again. By freezing the hard drive, it causes the components to shrink which can enable the track marker to align with the tracks again (as a badly worn out or damaged hard drive may be misaligned and hence the strange mechanical noises it makes when booting up).
I'd like to add that this is not a proven method for fixing a hard drive, it tends to work on old hard drives a lot more than newer ones, and it is a last ditch solution to recover any badly needed data.