HD locked

I have a western digital 40 gig hard drive that has quit working on me. It won't boot up and says there is no os available. I don't even feel it spinning like it should. I've tried hooking it up as a slave on another computer and it don't even reconize the drive being there. There a lot of info I need to get off of it but it looks like I may be S.O.L. Does anyone know of a way to retrieve the info? Can the disk be removed and exchanged into another HD that works?

 

If the HD is really that dead and you really want the info back, you might be better off going to a data recovery business and getting help.

It is possible to remove the platters and put them into another identical drive that is working, although the odds of you breaking both drives like this are really high. Any amount of dust getting into the drive well it's running is very bad. I really DO NOT recommend doing this, unless you don't mind breaking both the drives completely.

 

Coco has a good point -- messing with the innards of a hard drive usually doesn't work. They are very high-precision devices.

But if the drive is literally stuck (sometimes the head sticks to the platter, so it won't spin up), you could try removing the drive from your computer case, hooking up the cables again, apply power, and tap it gently. That can sometimes break loose a head that's stuck to the platter. It's not a very effective technique, because the heads are very light -- almost no inertia.

You can also try rotating the drive vigorously in the plane of the disk. The idea is to make the platter's inertia break it loose from the head. This can be a more effective technique.

Don't do either if you're going to take the drive to a recovery specialist. It's pretty easy to overdo either technique, and the recovery specialist won't thank you for it.

If you get the drive going, get your data onto another drive. If it stuck once, it probably will again.