How can we recover files from a broken hard drive?

[WECoyote]

Fellas--

I am screwed (Will be...)


I have a Western Digital 40 Gig hard drive, it contains about 30 gigs of important files and utilties. I need some serious help here, What happens, is that my hard drive was getting some "intergrity failure" errors every time I boot up, and I have tried to remove some files from the near dying hard drive and put it into the 2nd 40GB backup I have. Every time when I put a file or folder into the new hard drive, it keeps saying "File not found" , and it takes 4 ever to read a file and write it into the 2nd HD, but the files are there. (Currently on XP, but I tried taking the dying HD off and reinswap it on Win 98, it wont do any justice. ) The reason why it says "intergrity failure" since it has been "clicking" and getting some unusual rattling sounds. It works just fine when idling or running, but I need just to move the files off from the hard drive and place it into a healthy one. since I hate to redownload all those file all over again...Can anyone please save me?


I really appreciate all your help in anyway you can.. I know, my financee told me "Always back up..." but im too lazy to do it and now, it hits me to the back.

Many help or any file recovery utilities or anything is really appreciated..

Thanks
Wile'

[HotRod]

I just lost a Full 80 gig. Lots of MP3's and stuff.
Good luck getting your stuff back.
Like you mine started clicking and would freeze my system up, lock it up so tight all I could do is hit the power button. When I boot back up, it scans, boots, then locks up again. Found if I unhook the drive for a while and let it cool down, hook it back up, I can get a couple file before it locks up again. At least what I have gotten so far is usable.
Going to take a long time to recover 80 gig this way.

Good Luck to ya

HotRod

[Dave]

You had the right idea by trying to recover the files from another operating system because the less you use the bad drive, the better off you are.
You might not want to be booting to it and running your OS from it while your trying to recover your stuff.

I would pull the bad drive and get the replacement drive running with an operating system if at all possible. It will really help later if the drive "dies" or get worse becuse running a data recovery tool from a working version of Windows is much better. Non of the long-filename problems you get trying to recover through DOS.

After you get the replacement drive setup, slave the old drive to it and copy the files a little at a time, maybe a gig at a time. Don't try to do it all at once because you don't want to keep having to start over.

Hotrod is right about it working better on a cool drive, if you have trouble let it rest till it's cool and try again. (or put the drive in a ziplock bag and pop it in the fridge for a while).

Start with the most important things first and if you get to a point were you can't get it to copy anymore you can install a data recovery tool and try it that way.

Best of luck Wile,
Dave

[WECoyote]

Guys, thanks for all the information. I have a small solution, (real small) I took a big summer fan, i had the fan on high, blew it directly to the hard drive, it works little by little. So far, I have recovered I would say about 7 files out of 60. I am starting to recover smaller files like 2-12MB's in size and then nervously going to 200-600MB's in size (most are ISO's.)

I will try that idea of what HotRod was saying, to plop the hard drive off and put it in the fridge for a while and see what happens from there. My financee spoke to me last night, "why not put the whole HD into a CD burner and make one CD" ans Im scratching my head, saying "huh?" 40GB=650MB?? nah but its worth a guess. I will try to do it once at a time. Funny is that as I was successful in transferring smaller files, its faster, and it deletes faster as I wanted to, then I tried to move on to a bigger one, it gets slower and freezes.

Sigh..

Thanks all..
Wile'

[just_do_IT]

My solution worked.

I installed another HD. I used a recovery agent from a great ?in1 magician and got all my files back.

PM me if you dont have the utility cd.