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Hard Drive Failure

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okay I have a western digtial hard drive its 60gb, one day it just stoped working. There is no clicking sound. The computer will not boot with the drive connected, and if i try to mount the drive via usb once the computer is in windows (xp pro) then it says new hardware found, but never mounts the drive for use, and it is otherwise unaccessable. Basicaly i will retire the drive if it is broken, however i need my data.

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by oh smeg

Now depending on what Data you have on it you have to decide if it's worth the cost of attempted recovery.

A cheap and easy option is to change the circuit Board over if you can hear the Drive spinning up and you will need an identical drive to take the circuit Board off to connect to this HDD. If that works get your data off immediately via the USB External Caddy and then scrap the HDD and the second one that you bought as the Circuit Board should now be considered as suspect and not worth the risk involved to keep using it.

If that doesn't work there is only one alternative if you really need your data and that is to send the drive to a Data Recovery House. These places tend to charge you for the quote to recover your Data but if you give them the go ahead they will deduct the price of the Quote from the over all recovery job.

If the drive is dead they will need to dismantle it and read the data directly off the Platters and this is not cheap I recently paid $46,000.00 AU to have a 40 GIG HDD recovered that had died but as that had Tax Information on it that wasn't stored anywhere else and they where facing an audit it was money well spent and a direct Tax Deduction as well.

What you need to decide is if the data is worth the cost of recovery which can range from about 1K up to several Hundred Thousand $ depending on what needs doing. The closer a HDD is to working the less that you pay and then you need to look at what is required to recover your data and if there is any Forensic Recovery Required which is the expensive end of this type of work where everything that has ever been written to the HDD can be recovered.

Basically if the drive is dead though you should be looking at a figure starting somewhere around the 1.5K mark upward depending on what is actually required and how quickly you need the data. The faster that you want it the more it costs as the Data Recovery Houses have to push other work aside to rush one job through.

Col

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