A few months ago I had my internal 120 Gb IDE HD fail on me. I hadn't backed in a few weeks but I am pretty certain I hadn't done much that couldn't be easily reproduced if necessary. Still I would like to be certain. Given the circumstances of my failure, several friends more familiar with PC vagaries suggested that I might still be able to recover data from the drive. Some websites suggest reattaching the drive via the cable for my CD drive. I tried this but this didn't work out as expected (for some time my CD stopped working - I had it checked out and got everything back to normal).
Anyway, I would still like to see if I can pull off any data from my old drive and there are conversion kits (basically you to drop an internal drive into a case and attach as you would dedicated ext HD through cables) that seem to allow you to mount your drive as an external HD (I think for IDE drives, this runs about $45). Is this worth a try?
Also assuming I need to buy some recovery software and I don't buy this internal-to-external conversion kit, how does one mount a drive for recovery? Is the available software worth the money or should I drop it off at a computer store?
I had an old hard drive stop working at work. Ouch, the system disk....not a data disk. I tried the put-it-in-freezer-for-a-while-then-try-it-again trick. It worked! Maybe coincidence, but I'll take good luck whenever it comes my way. I have a little utility (Norton Ghost 2003) that lets me make a mirror image of a hard disk. I did that and put the entire disk contents on a new hard disk and we're back in business. The only sad part of this story is that a chemist (me) had to do this rather than an IT person. My little network has 6 PCs all of the same vintage. I immediately made "Ghost" images of every system drive. These are compressed somehow, so they all fit on one spare hard drive. Now I'm safe for a few years. The data disks (which are on a server) get backed up to tape. It really is true, it's not a question of if you HD will fail, it's a question of when.
Discussion
1 repliesAnyway, I would still like to see if I can pull off any data from my old drive and there are conversion kits (basically you to drop an internal drive into a case and attach as you would dedicated ext HD through cables) that seem to allow you to mount your drive as an external HD (I think for IDE drives, this runs about $45). Is this worth a try?
Also assuming I need to buy some recovery software and I don't buy this internal-to-external conversion kit, how does one mount a drive for recovery? Is the available software worth the money or should I drop it off at a computer store?
Thanks for the help.
Pete D.