"DEAD" hard drive - Need to recover data

Ok folks I have a problem.

I have a 250 gig hard drive that basically died on me. Since I was building a new computer anyway, I just left it in my old machine and built my new computer.....well time came and I wanted to recycle the old machine, but I pulled the old hard drive (the "dead" one).

I want to pull the data that is on there but I am running into this problem. It's an IDE drive and I plugged it into the motherboard and power supply and booted the machine.

The motherboard recognized the drive, but when the computer boots to Vista, Vista doesn't show it Computer, but yet when I go to Device Manager, it shows the drive - yet I can't access anything.

How can I pull the data I want from the drive before I give up and drill holes into the platters?

 

Hello. Do you have it installed as slave? If so and can't be read, try this. Start,Control Panel,Administrative Tools,Computer Management,Disk Management. Find your 250GB drive if it shows up.Right click,choose Open. Then find files you want and use "send to " command.Good luck.

 

It's installed as a slave drive on the IDE cable with my primary drive being on the SATA cable.

I'll give it a try....someone also mentioned (can't remember) if you stick a "dead" drive into the freezer then it sometimes will work.....I am hesitant to do that.

I should also mentioned I also tried to view the files by booting into a live version of Ubuntu and it said I had a SCSI drive (or similar) but it said it was "unable to mount".

 

You said that the drive was 'Dead' when it was in old computer so do you mean you could not access it then and it was kaput..?? if it is totally dead and unreadable you could resort to the freezer trick which I have tried succesfully. The best way to do this I have found is to leave it somewhere like the coolest place in the house to reach that tempature. Then wrap it tightly in a palstic bag and leave in the 'Fridge' to reach that tempature take out and wipe any condensation put in a fresh bag and then put in freezer. Leave for several hours and once again check for any moisture. Now here comes the tricky bit make sure it is slaved and other HD has plenty of room and then you have about 5 minutes to drag data accross or until it heats up and the plates get jambed again. Of course this is a last course of action.

 

Ok, here's what happens with the drive.

I plugged in the IDE connector and power cable. Drive is in "slave" mode.

Plug in PC, power on pc. I can feel the drive spin up, but I don't hear the clicks like the arms moving.

Window Vista boots up but I do not get an "new hardware found" message. Up to this point, this drive has never been connected to this computer, so it should say new hardware found.

I can't see it in the "Computer" that shows all of the drives (Hard drive, DVD RW, BD/DVD) but I can find it under device manager.

 

If it shows up under device manager, perhaps your answer is as simple as assigning the drive a letter. I'm not familiar with vista but in XP if you open computer management then go to disk management, if the drive shows up there it will tell you the status of the drive and all that. From there you could assign a drive letter if the drive is operable. Just a thought.