Hard drive crashed please help!

[graw2]

You can get an adapter cable for about 20 bucks. I think it would be worth a try if you have a lot of important information you want to keep. Since the OS is on it, I don't know how it would read it.

Plus it might come in handy in the future.

 

[berry120]

Whatever you do, if you do go down the freezer route make sure you seal it in a bag first! You'll get condensation on the drive otherwise which will make things far worse.

A linux livecd is a good thing to try if you haven't already. If all else fails then it's worth trying chkdsk just in case it does anything - bear in mind though that this might well make things worse rather than better if it overwrites / wipes the wrong stuff, so treat it as a last resort. If all else fails it's really unlikely to do much anyway.

Still - at least you understand the importance of regular backups now right?

 

[GVSS]

Originally posted by berry120
A linux livecd is a good thing to try if you haven't already. If all else fails then it's worth trying chkdsk just in case it does anything - bear in mind though that this might well make things worse rather than better if it overwrites / wipes the wrong stuff, so treat it as a last resort. If all else fails it's really unlikely to do much anyway.

Still - at least you understand the importance of regular backups now right?

I tried running an ubuntu disk as a live cd, got it to boot, but when I accessed the "file system" drive I couldn't see anything other than the linux files. I'm not very familiar with ubuntu so I may not have been looking at the right drive but I wasn't able to see anything that looked like my original files.

If you have a good resource on where to get more information on ubuntu and/or using a live cd for file recovery I would appreciate it.

Also it's not my drive it's a friend of mine that I'm trying to do a favor for. (also the reason I don't want to buy anything if I don't have to)

Thanks
-GVSS