There's a tiny little man stuck inside my hard drive!

August 2, 2005 3:42 PM

Help me recover data off a (seemingly) dead laptop hard drive.

So my late-model Thinkpad is blue screening with an "Unmountable Boot Drive." Running chkdsk from the Windows XP Recovery Console causes the hard drive to sound as though a tiny, tiny man is trapped inside it, knocking desperately at the drive's metal enclosure in order to force his way out. I don't really want to mess around with the drive any further because I don't want to make things worse.

There's no shortage of mail-away data recovery companies that claim they can grab the data off failed drives. My question: which companies have you used that delivered as promised, and were quick and cost-effective?

posted by killdevil to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Very similar question asked a month ago. It's going to cost at least $1,000 to get it fixed.
posted by blag at 5:41 PM on August 2, 2005

You might first try to recover it yourself with Knoppix.
posted by nimsey lou at 6:07 PM on August 2, 2005

If you think there is ANY chance that it is the computer,, or how the drive is in the computer, or something like that get yourself a USB laptop hard drive enclosure ($15 on ebay) and give that a shot. Otherwise, see above.
posted by true at 8:15 PM on August 2, 2005

Response by poster: That rare gem, a positive outcome:

I was able to pull what I needed off the drive with Stellar Phoenix, despite the drive head crashing and thrashing during the process. Thanks for the pointers, folks.
posted by killdevil at 8:27 PM on August 2, 2005

Hurrah! I like happy endings.
posted by blag at 3:54 AM on August 3, 2005