Data Recovery

[caLLous]

Ok so I have this old Maxtor 40GB IDE drive. It died and it has some photos on it that I'd like to retrieve so I bought a IDE/SATA to USB adapter thing and tried it. It was the sole drive in the (extremely) old computer so it was the boot disk and everything, I was hoping it would just be some boot issue or something. It didn't work, it showed up as a removable drive in Explorer but nothing else happened.

Now, I have a box of old HDD's (mixture of SATA and IDE) in the garage so I fished it out and tried all of the drives through this adapter. ALL of the SATA drives worked fine and ALL of the IDE drives failed.

Does this sound like a dodgy adapter or a *massive* coincidence? All of the drives in that box are at least 6 years old (couple of IBM 60GXP's aka the Deathstar in there too) but it just strikes me as odd that all of the SATA ones spun up fine and presented themselves to Windows but none of the IDE ones did.

Failing that, anybody have any experience with data recovery companies? I made a few tentative enquiries and was quoted the best part of £3k for analysis and recovery. Thaaaaat's not gonna happen. :\

 

[Scouse]

What's it sound like when it spins up?

TBH, it's not going to please you - but I predict in a few posts time you'll feel pretty down about the loss of your photos.

Take it on the chin and make the decision now to configure proper backups of all of your data from all of your devices. I constantly evangelise about this and people keep coming to me saying "I know you told me to back shit up, but I didn't get round to it. My phone's died, and I've lost all the photos I took when I got engaged in New York with my boyfriend recently. Anything you can do?"

Yes. I can laugh in your face and say "I told you so" so every time you think "should I back this up now or go to the pub?" you'll remember the pain and me being a totally unsympathetic asshole to you, and choose to stay in and back your shit up.


Plus - get all of your photo's printed out so you have a physical copy. Submit them all en-mass to some online thingy. Take the hit. Do it!

 

[leggy]

I have an IDE to USB adapter which I used for the same thing and I know it works. If you still can't solve the problem, I'll whack it in the post for you to try... it's not likely that I'll ever use it again anyway.

You'll need to connect a power supply separately though as it doesn't do power over USB to the HD (I'm not sure if any of them do anyway).

 

[Raven]

Someone had a similar problem at work, someone told them to put the drive in the freezer overnight (In an airtight bag) and plugging it into the IDE socket on the mobo. Other than that smacking an HD on a desk has fixed it for me before

 

[caLLous]

What's it sound like when it spins up?

Spins up then clicks (in a good way) a few times and then just spinning. But then, every single IDE drive I plugged into the adapter made that noise (except the deathstars, they sounded *awful* but I'm pretty sure they're dead anyway and in that box for a reason) and then proceeded to do nothing, unlike the SATA ones which popped straight up as drives in Explorer. I set all of the jumpers on the IDE drives to master.

...configure proper backups of all of your data from all of your devices. I constantly evangelise about this and people keep coming to me saying "I know you told me to back shit up, but I didn't get round to it. My phone's died, and I've lost all the photos I took when I got engaged in New York with my boyfriend recently. Anything you can do?"

I'm you in this scenario. Replace "people" with "my mother" and you have my situation.

I have an IDE to USB adapter which I used for the same thing and I know it works. If you still can't solve the problem, I'll whack it in the post for you to try... it's not likely that I'll ever use it again anyway.

You'll need to connect a power supply separately though as it doesn't do power over USB to the HD (I'm not sure if any of them do anyway).

Thanks, I've ordered another, different one. This Startech one is hella fancy, it does IDE (40pin and 44pin) and SATA and it has it's only power supply with all appropriate connectors for molex and SATA power. The "IDE" LED lights up when I plug an IDE drive into it but it just seems odd that all the SATA disks worked and none of the IDE ones did.