If your Deskstar drive is doing a click-click-pause, you can get your data back!
I have 2 IBM Deskstar 60GB drives, about 1.5 years old. A month ago, I was backing up data from one of them, and it froze. I rebooted, and WinXP took 10mins too boot, and the drive in question never showed up. So I ripped the case off, and to my gut renching surpise, the drive was giving me the [click of death] . So I spent the next few weeks trying to find a solution, as I am not going to RMA a drive with all my data on it. I *NEED* that data. So after trying just about every method I could find, I finally found a combination that worked.
[Solution]
Things to note:
- Freezing the drive had no effect, but try to keep the drive cool throughout the restore process. I had a fan blowing over the drive in question constantly
- Putting the drive in different positions (i.e. on it's side, end, etc) had no effect. Lay it flat.
- From what I can tell, the data is not lost. The drive seems to make sectors as 'bad' in certain sections of the drive, and thus 'can't read them'.
What you will need:
- 2 Drives of equal or greater size that are working
- A copy of "Media Tools Professional" [FULL] http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/mtl.htm (I had version 3.3)
- A copy of "Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional 6" [FULL] http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/
- A floppy diskette
[For these instructions, the BAD drive will be called Drive-B, and the good drive will be Drive-A. Drive-C is where the data will be restored (This CAN be an FTP site)]
1 - Hook up Drive-B and Drive-A onto your mainboards IDE controller (NOT any onboard HPT, RAID, etc)
2 - Boot off the floppy containing Media Tools Pro
3 - Select the Drive-B and choose Clone, Drive-to-Drive
4 - Select the Drive-A as the destination, and press Ctrl-S to bring up the options screen
5 - Change the rety attepts to '1', and click off the 'disable error control codes on last attempt'
6 - Choose to 'Invert' the clone (the last check box on the options screen)
7 - Start this process and wait for days (my 60GB drive took 49 hours) You will hear ALOT of clicking and it will the remaining time will bounce around from 200,000 hours down to 2 seconds. This is normal, but be prepared for a LONG wait.
--After clone is done--
8 - Reboot into WindowsXP, with Drive-A connected (disconnect Drive-B)
9 - Open up Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro 6 and do an advanced recovery
10 - Choose Drive-A and select the Advanced Options
11 - Choose Advanced scan, and 'Disable MFT'
12 - Start the scan (this took 1.2 hours). Then it will present you with a file list of what it files it found.
13 - Select the files/directories you want to restore and then select Drive-C as your destination
14 - As it starts to restore, it will prompt you to 'Overwrite' files. DO NOT OVERWRITE ANYTHING. Most of the files are cross-linked, and you will end up with garbage. You need to either 'RENAME' each one, OR, wait for it prompt you to rename, then in an explorer window, delete the files that it restored, and then click overwrite. Here is an example:
- You have selected the dir 'mp3'
- It starts restoring by putting all your *.mp3 files in there (ex: e:\mp3\*.mp3)
- After it restores all the files in that dir, it will restore the same files, with different data.
- At this point, it will ask you if you want to overwrite or rename
- Open Explorer, and delete all the files in e:\mp3 - Then click 'Rename' in the dialogue box
- It will then write out the GOOD data
AND THANKS TO THE GRACE OF GOD, YOUR DATA IS BACK! I got %99 of my data restored, using this workflow.
The ONLY thing I didn't mention was that I updated the drives BIOS before I did this. I have NO clue if that made any difference.
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