hey again everybody, i seem to have to post a lot here!


This time it is my dad's work computer, he said he left work one day, with the computer working fine, the next day he came back and the computer's hard drive froze. He called the computer tech with the company and they swapt out the hard drives for him.

For what ever reason, he didnt say why, the tech did not attempt to get the old hard drive working, they just pulled out the old and in the new. He brought home the old one and was wondering if there is anyway to retrieve the information on the drive, to putt on his new drive.

His drive is a Western Digital-

WD400
Enhanced IDE Hard Drive
WD Caviar
40.0 GB

Any ideas? thanks in advanced!

Tyler

Mod Edit: Moved topic to more appropriate forum. ~ Animal

hi, Tyler,

the tech probably had a good reason for replacing drive, eg, drive not spinning, circuitry blown, whatever,

but if you want you could try and attach it as a 'slave' in the computer and if it works and windows sees files, then they can be removed. remember to adjust jumper settings.

you always ask your dad to ask the tech to elaborate on the fault!

good luck.

I assume the tech probably had a good reason for replacing the drive, but then again the drive might still be recoverable. On the few details you were able to give its difficult to say for sure.

There's an old trick that may work for your dad, place the hdd in a ziplock bag and then put it in the freezer for about an hour. This contracts the disks and allows them to move. This is a short time solution!

If you get it up and running - try http://www.pcinspector.de for some free recovery software.

I tried that once, but it didn't work for me.

Yeah, i heard about the freezing bag trick, my dad said he saw it on google. Unfortunatly i currently dont have a computer that i can plug the drive into. I dont want to use my computer because everytime i do anything out of the norm with that peice of junk something goes wrong.

but i will let him know about ur suggestions and hopefully we can recover some of his data.

Thanks again and i will let u know if i have anyother problems.
Tyler

"Unfortunatly i currently dont have a computer that i can plug the drive into"

How about his computer?
That would be logical as he could then just drag the data to the new hard drive if you caan get it working.

Freezing it does sometimes work but then only for a very short time.

There are professional data recovery services that can get the data off the dead drive (including some of the HD manufacturers like WD), but that is very expensive.

I guess it depends on how important the data is.