Backing up data from dead hard drive

[code_glitch]

1.) Boot a linux live cd
2.)
Get dd_rescue and use that to make an image of the drive you can write to another (if you have one of equal or greater capacity to hand. Not an exact science)
OR
Photorec - great program gets just about everything you could possibly want off an HDD. Even if the MBR has corrupted partitions / partially overwritten or corrupted partitions.

Sorry to hear of your loss though - mechanical disks are very hard (and expensive) to come by these days :/

[SilverWarior]

After some more testing I find out that the problem lies in the HDD electronic board itself (did managed to spin the motor by connecting it directily to another HDD electronic board).
So I'll need to take the HDD back to that company so that they replace electornic board. Luckily this would aparently const me about 20€ wich is acceptable.

[LP]

Would you mind sharing what was the brand/model of the hard-drive that failed and what was its usage patterns?

It's curious because I've never had a single hard-drive failure and some of hard drives I have are roughly 10 years old, but I usually use WD brand for desktop and Fujitsu for laptops. I also have some Seagate hard-drives, but these wear out too quickly, becoming slower and noisier.

If you had problems with spinning, then data recovery would have been very expensive and require highly specialized hardware tools.

[SilverWarior]

It is a Hitachi Deskstar HDD. It is well known for this model off HDD for having many problems. Unfortunatly when my mom bought prebuild computer this drive was in. If I would be building this computers from components I would definitly put WD HDD in it.
I also use mostly WD HDD's. And to be honest in all my time I'm working with computers I olny saw one WD HDD wich died and even this one died becouse of lightning strike.
Segate drives are mostly OK but are much more noisier even from the start.
Fujitsu laptop drives are reliable but quite slow compared to some others. They also tend to be louder than others.

PS: The drive was never used for any hard work (masive data copying or something). Actualy it died while computer was in sleep mode.

[chronozphere]

Thanks for this thread, which reminds me that I should spend some time creating an automated backup script of some kind. I've invested in my own 2x2TB RAID 1 server, so I will really bump my head into the wall if I still loose any data.

Luckily, I'm already using the server to host git repositories so at least my code is pretty safe.

[code_glitch]

Hitachi is one company I trust for laptop drives though. A bit noisy and a tad slow(er) than desktop drives BUT it survived two falls from > 2m while powered up so I must say they have a lot of battle strength