Anybody ever used Linux to recover an XP hard drive?

[sabercatpuck]

Just fiured I would check. My buddy has an XP machine that is now experiencing "The clicks of death" from his hard drive and I have looked around and found that the best option out there at the moment seems to be ddrescue (aka gddrescue) as seen here :

http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-recover-data-even-when-hard-drive-is-damaged/

Figure'd I would see if anyone had seen or used any other hidden tricks of the recovery trade before I head off into the sunset with my buddies hard drive

One thing I was wondering about especially is if there is a specific need to have a 3rd drive involved or if I can just dump the image to my internal hard drive as long as I have enough space for it(I don't see any reason why I shouldn't be able to, but ya never know)

[Guest]

Put it in the freezer for a while then put it into a machine that it is not the boot drive, boot up and copy his most important stuff first. I used to have all my customers using the IBM DeskStar (death star) drives and sometimes the freezer works, sometimes not.

Never tried it in Linux but if it will work in a PC booted off a working drive it would probably work in Linux. Trying to do a full drive recover where the death star heats up to full operating temp will probably not work well if it has the click bad. Go for his most important data first.

[sabercatpuck]

A little more info

Biggest problem is the drive is not showing correctly in the BIOS. It shows as a WDC ROM MODEL - HAWK----- 02.01C03, and lists the size as a 8GB drive.
The reality is:
250GB
WD2500JS-98MHBO (could be a 0)
26 Dec 2005
DSBHCT2AH

There is notable corrosion on the board, though it is not wildly out of control either. I did try to clean the contacts to the pins that leads to the heads electronics to no avail (on the outside, did not crack the case of the hard drive)
IC's on the board include :
hynix HY57V641620ETP-6
M 88i6545-TFJ1 FM04021A.1
ATMEL536 25F1024AN
SMOOTH L6283 1.3 9921E VH MYS 99 544 ST

I have seen some info that these hard drives are known for having issues on the main board and that there is information stored in the Atmel IC, likely info on the low level condition of the drive and possibly the boot firmware as well.

Well back to research...

[sabercatpuck]

This info looks interesting

First the general research is that it is not unusual for items on the main PCB to die, if so these can be fixed by those with a small amount of soldering skills, or a few of the places that I saw selling replacement boards will move the data from the U12 IC over to the new one for you so you dont even have to unsolder and resolder it on the replacement board.

This looks to be interesting info as well for this problem:

http://www.datarecoveryunion.com/wd-hdds-noise-related-to-pcb/

[Guest]

Good luck with the recovery. That is far more advanced state of death than any one I have ever needed to recover.

[sabercatpuck]

Next step

Found what should be a suitable donar board on **** (as long as it works) for $15 that we are going to try. Will need to move the U12 eeprom over but I should be ok soldering 8 pins. Hopefully be here early next week.

[sabercatpuck]

IT"S ALIVE!!!!!!!

Looks like the new PCB worked like a champ. For curiosity I did try it as is. The symptoms were a bit different, it would still give the "clicks of death", but it would at least no longer fault out at the BIOS screen. I then proceded to swap the U12 EEPROM that contains the drive specific parameters and now it looks like it is being recognized by the BIOS correctly and I can see the files again normally so I guess I will not likely need to do a complete image with DDrescue now anyway.

I do need to give a shout out to Scott Moulton at http://myharddrivedied.com/ . He has some very good video's on youtube under the name SuperFlyFlippingA that give quite a few tricks to hard drive recovery, many of which can be tried before spending the dollars on a recovery service. He does do drive recovery service professionally, and is one of the few people to offer a course in the proper techniques as a class.

[Andrea Mathew]

Hi,
Since this situation is a bit tough, I believe it is not good to waste time. I have used a software called Remo Recover. There is an option called Disk Image. It will quickly take the image and later you can take the backup. It might be a disaster if the hard drive crashed while recovering. So taking a disk image is also an option. Most of the recovery software has this option I guess. I tried Recuva 1st, but unfortunately the disk image recovery didn't work as expected. So I purchased Remo.
I would suggest you to go for Recuva initially as it is a free software.

https://forum.piriform.com/topic/32671-running-recuva-on-a-dd-image/

https://www.remosoftware.com/hard-drive-cloning-and-imaging-software

Hope this would help!