Rescuing data from a physicall damaged drive

L

lnoelstorr

Registered
Hi,

I recently caused my iMac G5 to fall over (long story - my own stupid fault) which seems to have physically damaged the drive.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience of using Data Rescue X (or any other program) for rescuing data from the drive.

I've managed to find copies of most of my photo elsewhere, and the kind people at iTMS let me download my purchases again for free (I'd only asked to download my last two orders again as I hadn't backed them up yet), so I have most of what I want off the drive.

Given that, I'm not at the moment prepared to pay £200+ to get the data restored by professionals, so wondered if anyone had has any luck restoring data themselves.

I'm also concerned that trying to do so may cause further damage, which I want to avoid in case I remember some other important files I had on the drive.
 
ProSoftEngineering's Data Rescue has worked for many people. You can download a trial version that will recover one file at a time to see if it will work before paying for the product, so it is certainly worth trying. Whether the recovered files will be clean or corrupted is dependent on a variety of factors so you will likely incur some data loss. Good luck!
 
Well, just before starting this thread I'd sent a query to ProSoft asking if it worked on physically damaged disks, and just before your reply I got an answer back saying that it didn't.

However, I've also searched Google and found a few reports of it working on physically damaged drives (dropped laptops and iPods and so on), so I guess I'll give it a go anyway. I suppose they may not have understood what I meant by "physically damaged".
 
Hmm, well Data Resucue reports the drives as 0 bytes, and says:

"Cannot recover this volume: this volume is empty"


and trying the dd method BobW linked to gives a load of "Device is not configured" errors, and seems to be creating a massive file of nulls (and nothing else) as the output.


Looks like a data recovery company is my only hope :(
 
lnoelstorr said:
and trying the dd method BobW linked to gives a load of "Device is not configured" errors, and seems to be creating a massive file of nulls (and nothing else) as the output.
Click to expand...

In that case it may have damaged the read heads as well as the disk platter.
 
Captain Code said:
In that case it may have damaged the read heads as well as the disk platter.
Click to expand...

and would it be complete madness (or impossible) for me to buy a new drive, disassemble the two, and switch the read heads from the new one into the old one?

A new drive is at most just half the cost of getting it recovered by any data recovery company I've come accross.
 
If you really know what you're doing you could do it. This is sometimes how the data recovery places do it. But it's extreamly difficult and voids the warranty on the new drive.

Plus, you could end up wrecking both drives.
 
lol... Plus, you need what is called a "clean room." This is why recovery places charge big bucks... If you have dust in the air, God only knows how that would affect the reading and writing of the hard disk. Anybody want to explain in detail?
 
adambyte said:
lol... Plus, you need what is called a "clean room." This is why recovery places charge big bucks... If you have dust in the air, God only knows how that would affect the reading and writing of the hard disk. Anybody want to explain in detail?
Click to expand...

Pah, I've got a can of spray air, that'll be enough to blast all the dust out won't it? Especially if I go for the 'make your own clean room in your bathroom' approach.


I doubt I'll risk it though, I'll just save up the £200+ quid to get it done by the professionals.


Also, annoyingly, due to swapping the drive in and out of my iMac so many times, the rubber gromit that goes on the screw that holds it in has perished, I don't suppose anyone knows how I can get hold of a new one?
 
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