500gb hard drive data?
Less than 2 months old and the computer hard drive crashed with very important pictures and other documents.
It is a 500GB SATA hard drive. I tried it in different computers but the BIOS won’t see it, although you can hear and feel it spin. No heads rubbing the disk or any other aparent physical damage.
I tried several recovery programs but since they don’t see the HDD nor the BIOS does.
What can I do?
There is no clicking noise and I also tried it in a USB enclosure, nothing.
The manufacturer programs don’t work because they can’t see the HDD.
January 2nd, 2011 at 2:25 pm
You have to do it in a very new computer. 500GB drives aren’t recognized by older computers.
Is there any loud clicking noise? If so, that’s bad.
Western digital actually has a diagnostic program on their web site that detects faulty drives. You could try that.
Go to http://support.wdc.com/download/
and download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic
That will tell you if the drive is physically defective.
You could also try to get an external enclosure for it and plug it in via USB.
If, as you say, it cannot be recognized by any computer or USB enclosure, then I am sorry to say you are out of options for doing it yourself.
If you are desperate, the only other alternative is to send it to a Data recovery service.
January 2nd, 2011 at 3:24 pm
go to best buy and talk to geek squad. make sure you tell them (not these exact words b/c they would just walk away or kick u out) “im not a retard at computers, so dont talk about random, irrelevent shit that will just make you look stupid” and tell them to take the disk out and try it on an empty HDD to see if its the disk or just the reader itself
January 2nd, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Contact the manufacturer; it should still be under warranty. Depending on the warranty, they will probably only cover a replacement drive, not data recovery.
There are data recovery specialist which can retrieve the data off the drive, but it can be quite expensive.
January 2nd, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Take the drive out. Buy a USB IDE/SATA adapter. Connect the drive to another computer using the adapter and you should be able to recover your files.
wdw