Dead Hard Drive

[Spydaman]

The hard drive on my Sons laptop has died according to the repair shop he’s taken it to. He’s in his last year of university and just started his dissertation. Most of it he can recover from emails back-ups etc but some of it will be lost if he can’t access the hard drive. Any suggestion what he can do?

[geeks]

So... starter for 10...

What sort of hard drive? SSD? External etc? What is the fault? Can it see the disk but not the contents? Windows or Mac?

[Spydaman]

My Son is in Sweden so bear with me for details.

[drmotorsport]

If it's a competent repair shop then they should be able to offer a data recovery service or point you at a specialist recovery if it's really broken.

[Spydaman]

They have suggested a place in Gothenburg that could retrieve the data but at a cost of £1800.

[shtu]

Check that he doesn't unknowingly have a backup via a Microsoft Account or similar.

With that cost in mind, recover what he can from where he can, and get on with rewriting the missing content. I'll bet he can recover to 99% where he was in a matter of hours if he focuses on Getting st Done.

I know they'll get nitpicked into oblivion, but nudge him towards a service like OneDrive, Box, and so on.

[carl_w]

A valuable lesson in backing up data. One that I learned at university in very similar circumstances (it was a virus) and has served me well for over 30 years since.

[Spydaman]

geeks said:

So... starter for 10...

What sort of hard drive? SSD? External etc? What is the fault? Can it see the disk but not the contents? Windows or Mac?

Windows, no bootable device message and after forced reset stuck on acer screen, wont open bios, intermitent fan and keyboard lights. Drive put in another computer and that didnt recognise anything as connected

Internal hard drive, i assume ssd but dont know

The guy is replacing the hard drive with a new one and reinstalling windows then giving me the old hard drive

[otherman]

carl_w said:

A valuable lesson in backing up data. One that I learned at university in very similar circumstances (it was a virus) and has served me well for over 30 years since.

There are two types of hard drive, those that have failed and those that haven't failed yet. My desktop has 2TB and another 2TB backup which updates every day. Not as easy with a laptop of course.

[Hoofy]

The £2k quote was pretty much what I thought it might be for proper data recovery.

As for best practices to avoid this happening, if backups can't be done automatically every 1 second and you don't want to pay for an online service (Onedrive etc) then aside from weekly backups to some kind of physical drive, if I have been working on something for the last hour, I will upload it to Onedrive etc (the free version because my Word, Excel and MP4 files rarely exceed 1Gb!) until I've done my weekly backup.

[nvubu]

When you have the disk, connect it to your PC. Either directly to via a USB connector.

In the past I've used:

• Recuva - https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva - before it was under the ccleaner banner it was totally free.
• SpinRite - https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm (I still have the 2004 version)

I have had a play around with these 2 - but I don't remember when

• O&O DiskRecovery - https://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodiskreco...
• EaseUS Data Recovery - https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/

If he knows the filenames he needs to get back, with some of the above files you can filter the search. I'd try the free versions and if the files are "found", and you need to pay for a version then try that. Spinrite, I seem to remember, is the most thorough.

[simon_harris]

be very careful "playing" at data recovery. if the data is that important just pay a proper place to recover it for you, don't bother messing around.

I had someone in a similar situation that wiped any chance of recovery because they didn't want to pay the £600 that the recovery company quoted and had a go themselves.

[captain_cynic]

Spydaman said:

geeks said:

So... starter for 10...

What sort of hard drive? SSD? External etc? What is the fault? Can it see the disk but not the contents? Windows or Mac?

Windows, no bootable device message and after forced reset stuck on acer screen, wont open bios, intermitent fan and keyboard lights. Drive put in another computer and that didnt recognise anything as connected

Internal hard drive, i assume ssd but dont know

The guy is replacing the hard drive with a new one and reinstalling windows then giving me the old hard drive

Likely to be an SSD, laptops haven't come with spinning disks for ages.

Unfortunately if the device isn't being recognised it's likely dead which means there's very few ways to recover data off it and those will be hellishly expensive (such has having someone replace the NAND controller and hoping).

[carl_w]

otherman said:

There are two types of hard drive, those that have failed and those that haven't failed yet. My desktop has 2TB and another 2TB backup which updates every day. Not as easy with a laptop of course.

This is why online backup services exist. I've been using Spideroak for years as it encrypts locally and then sens the encrypted files to the server.

Before that I use a UK based thing called Deposit-it, but it was quite expensive with quite llimited space available. But that was in the early 2000s when files were smaller.

[biggiles]

The university probably has an IT helpdesk, who see this all the time, and will be able to do the basic checks, and suggest options. e.g. it's quite likely his documents are saved on the MS Onedrive / or other cloud option, it's pretty hard these days to avoid that on a Windows laptop.

I remember a plaintive queue of students clutching failed floppy disks back in the day... these days I would expect the universities push onedrive/cloud systems training to avoid all that.