Help recovering data from hard drive that wont initialize

Hi all
So i'm trying to recover the data from a hard drive that recently went caput. The family had a bad wind storm and the power went out before they were able to turn the computer off. It is a Maxtor Fireball3 30Gb hard drive. Running XP we think. Unfortunately the husband had a go at trying to recover stuff before giving it to me, so the jumpers may not be in the correct spot. Also, he stuck it in the freezer rolleyes thinking it was a head crash (it's not).
Basically i have it to the point where it will recognize on my win7 desktop with a USB/ata controller, but in disc manager it shows needing to be initialized, but I always get an error message, (drive not ready, etc).
When I plug it into my mac, it show up as 2TB, and when I try to partition it using disk utility it freezes and can't continue.
Part of me suspects I've got the jumpers wrong (even though I've tried all the combinations listed on the hdd itself).
Also it does not recognize in Testdisk or Photorec.
The family doesn't care about the hard drive being usable, they just would like some of their photos back.
Any suggestions??
thanks!
*EQL*

 

I would guess from the description that it's the controller board that has a problem, unfortunately, the effects of having had the drive in the freezer might be causing physical damage already

 

yea, i know thats possible but i'd like to try everything before i give up.
Any ideas on how to reinstall the firmware of the hdd?
*EQL*

 

You'd need to find as close as possible match for the controller board and swap it out but I've read that it's much more complicated than that with more recent drives.

Do you wanna start Googling, or shall I?

 

hmm.. i've done some googling of it. I was hoping that maybe a re-partition might help. So far i've had difficulty doing that (and right not my pc is busy doing a backup), but im wondering if i might be able to find a program that can partition it and make a new index but not actually write over the whole disk in a true format... hmmm
thanks,
*EQL*

 

No point in trying to repartition it until the size is being read correctly and Windows can see it. Try to find another drive of the same age, model and firmware revision that still works.

EDIT: here's a possible match.

And another - there's still a few around

 

hmmm, k thx

 

Hi Guys,

Surely if you try to create a new partition it will wipe out the old partition and lose all the data on the disk? Have you tried getdataback? Its a paid solution but I think you can download it for free as a trial to see if there is anything that it can recover. I have never used it myself but If testdisk cant find the partions then it doesn't look good?

Not sure whether this is any help but I thought I would chuck it in as a possability.

 

Hi

I've had luck recovering data from drives like that with iCare Data Recovery. It's not free, but I've had fairly good success recovering data from drives with a lot of different issues. In this case, you'd want to use the Lost Partition part of the program, should you decide to use it.

 

The problem here is that the drive isn't being recognized correctly = drive not ready, 2TB not 30GB; so 'normal' tools can't function.

 

Right. OP said that drive shows as needing initialized in Disk Mgmt. I've pulled stuff off of drives showing that same message with the iCare software. I've also used it to pull data off of drives showing as RAW/unformatted/etc.

However, if indeed the controller board is toast, then replacing that is likely the only option.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, is that while iCare works, it works very slowly. It has to find and examine the data, which can take hours (you can stop the finding part early if it shows thousands upon thousands of files found... that usually means that it's found the partition/data you need to pull), and actually transferring the data takes awhile, depending on the drive's condition... once it took me two days to pull data off a drive. It worked, though.

This site was posted in a previous thread for purchasing controller boards for HDDs:

HDD PCB, Hard Drive PCB For Data Recovery Needs! - HDDZone.com

This is one of a growing list of threads that remind me of the importance of keeping things backed up!

 

As in the BIOS is seeing the full size or windows isn't? If it is only Windows that cant recognise the size then the disk may be OK but the partition info is borked thus reports incorrect size. If the partition can be repaired then you may be able recover the data.

On this basis I assume its the BIOS that isnt reporting correctly?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Maxtor-Fireball-3-ATA-133-30gb-hard-drive-44-/200618228206?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eb5c739ee

http://cgi.ebay.com/Maxtor-Fireball-3-VAM51JJ0-30GB-IDE-Hard-Drive-/140565352271?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20ba590f4f

I know they are all US not Canada but they may help.

 

I think the important part of that statement in the OP was the part immediately after that - where the drive effectively disappears, and the later comment where TestDisk doesn't see it (I'd assumed TestDisk was run from a bootable CD though, could it have been run from Windows?).

One more check we could try is ensuring the correct cable and jumpering is being used.

Perhaps some screenshots of DiskMan with the drive attached and a description of how the BIOS reports the drive would make things a little easier to understand.

 

hi all,
windows testdisk does not detect it. Mac OS detects it as 2TB. I'm starting to think the best bet will be to ask them if they want to try a new PCB board (about $40 on ebay, i found the exact one).. I'll leave it up to them. I will try Linux though and see if that helps any.
Thanks
*EQL*

 

Windows Testdisk might detect it after a reboot, if you don't try to check it in DiskMan first.

The bootable version of Testdisk may stand a better chance.

Are you 100% sure that you have the correct jumper settings enabled?

 

yup.. tried it on both master and slave.