Recovering a Broken Hard Drive
 

Some brainiac at work dropped his laptop and busted the hard drive. It makes a lovely SOS pattern clicking and isn't recognized by the computer or card reader. I suspect the 'arm' inside is broken or the internal disks are off.

Is there any way possible to recover the data? No one at work thinks so, but I figured I'd ask the collective minds of this place.

There's no easy way. There are data recovery services that might be able to, depending on the extent of the damage, but it's at a price.

1. Put a piece of masking tape on it.
2. On the masking tape write: "Property of O.B. Laden. Top Secret."
3. Ship the laptop Islamabad, Pakistan.
4. Arrange for someone to drop it in the mountains on the border with Afghanistan.
5. In four or five months submit a FOIA request to the various intelligence agencies requesting the contents of a laptop labeled "Property of O.B. Laden" but containing non-sensitive data.
6. Six months after that hand the reams of paper over to the person who broke the laptop and say "Start typing."

Sorry, no serious answer. I know nothing of data recovery.

Alex, that's the best idea. I think I'll do that.


Seriously, thanks for confirming what we figured. Hopefully this will be taken as a harsh lesson in why it's a good idea to back up your data to the network.

You should probably look into a recovery service, if there was anything important on there. A few hundred $ might be worth it.

We almost always use the network because we had a marketing manager (before my time), that only saved to his local drive and wiped it when he quit.

At that time, Marketing was the new kid in town for my company, an old-school company that had just handed the reigns over to a new generation. Our presence wasn't very much appreciated by the other departments... it's really only been more recently that things have changed for the positive in terms of getting inter-departmental help. While I think the data could have ultimately been saved, either no one in IT wanted to do it or they didn't know how to do it (or want to Google how to do it).

So, in my department, we're religious about saving to the network.

The company won't do it, they said too bad.

I've been trying to encourage people do back up to their "P"ersonal drive. But they don't get it, or why (despite explaining that hard drives aren't indestructible). Then I asked about mapping the My Documents folder (where everyone stores their stuff) to the "P"ersonal drive and my co-worker said people wouldn't understand it so they aren't going to do it.

Which brings me to a minor vent I'll put elsewhere.

BTD:

Try (In order):

Hold it upside down or at other odd angles while booting.
Give it a good hard wrap on the side with a small hammer, try to boot
Freeze it and then try to boot


Of course non of this will help one damn bit but it gives the illusion you are trying everything possible.

You can suggest a solution that synchs their My Documents folder with the network drive. That way things are both saved to the network AND available offline.

That's what I suggested.