Hi,
The hard-disk of my laptop (Compaq) crashed yesterday evening
By the sound of it (grrrrrrrr...khrrrrrrr...brrrrrrr), it seems to have suffered a physical damage.
Any idea where/how I can at least recover the data from it? Any professionals in/around Zurich?

If it is physical damage to the drive then it's going to cost 1000's to fix if it is even possible. If you are lucky, it is just bad sectors and the grinding noise is the drive seeking trying to read it. If that is the case, if anything can fix it, then SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/spinrite) can. If not, then expensive data recovery from someone like http://www.cbltech.ch/en/ beckons I'm afraid.

If the drive is recognised by your computer, I'd give PC Inspector a try. It's recovered stuff for me in the past. The best thing is that it's free.

Download it here: http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1

Good luck.
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It's unlikely to be physical damage, unless something went terrible wrong. The drive heads normally don't touch the disk at all.

So if you want to DIY, the first problem is getting access to the drive from a non-booting PC.

If you don't have access to a boot CD, you can download a bootable Linux CD pack called "Knoppix" http://www.knoppix.net/ . This can access your drive read-ony, and allow you to copy things off - so as long it can read anything. You might have to push F1/F8/Del or something as your computer boots to tell it to use the CD instead. Some PCs are configured to do this automatically. There's usually a message on the screen for a split second before it starts up.

Failing that, you can pull the hard drive out and place it an external USB drive enclosure. Any small computer shop should be able to do this, or you could do it yourself in 10 minutes.

hope this helps,
(Mr)Wibble

Try what's been described above, but by the sounds it's making it doesn't seem good. It's possible that it just makes that noise when it is accessing a certain area of the disk. If so, you may be lucky. Try it under Knoppix and copy as much as you can off it onto an external hard disk. These drives can easily be replaced so no need to buy a whole knew laptop!

Backup backup backup

Before doing anything, if you're not 100% certain of what you're doing :

- If your data is critically important to you : get professional help !

- If not : put your drive in a zip lock bag, and then in the freezer for a few hours, plug it back in your computer, boot from a USB key or Live CD, copy the files ASAP to your USB key, another computer using the network, or another drive. Do not write anything to the failed drive as this will likely cause further filesystem corruption.

Good luck !

What does the freezer do? I've heard of that before.

I don't really know how it works but it saved my a$$ a few times already.

The explanations could either be of the metal from the platters retracting hence allowing the heads not to crash (I don't really believe in that) or that the IC's on the logic board are failing and that low temperatures allow them to work for a while (sounds more reasonable).

I can vouch for Spinrite firsthand... It has worked wonders on a couple of drives which refused to be read under normal circumstances. (I only wish GRC made a Mac version!)

If the drive can be recognized by the BIOS, then you should be able to run spinrite on it.

Just wanted to say, for eventual future users of the post, that the freezer work

I did not have much faith but hey, it has given the hard drive another 2 hrs of life so far and 1/3 of data already recovered... still working at getting the rest but it was a great tip!

Thanks to all for this!

Cheers,
K

Hmmm... I must say the freezer stuff sounded like an urban legend but hey, whatever works!

Freeing works in some cases when the drive has damage to the mechanical parts, another trick I used on seagate drives (sie geht oder sie geht nicht) was to drop them from a few inch, thus freeing a jammed worm screw. Hey I use a MAC, things are simple.
But maybe it is just a corrupt boot sector, depending on the drive type you could jumper the thing as slave and use another drive as master, if SCSI jumper it to another address.
good luck and may the force be with you.

Yeah me too... but desperation makes you faithful

Recovered ALL the data and hard drive is actually still working... and well....

Will get it replaced anyway but I am now on fire to try it with 2 older drives as well and see if music from my youth can be recovered

Let's see...

Ciao
K

I used the freezer trick to bring life back to my iPod. After just over a year (naturally), it wouldn't boot up. By freezing it, I got another six months out of it. It works because the different metals contract at different speeds.

Annoyingly, Apple were using Toshiba hard drives at the time, and they weren't available retail, so I couldn't repair the ipod myself. That is why I don't buy Apple - too much proprietry hardware and software.