I've heard that this is very expensive, but I really need it done, I have some photos of some family that passed and the the HD went bad on myhome PC, I have the HD's here and was wondering if anyone here can get it done here locally...'Henry

Western is the brand if it matters

They have software that does it. Does the drive make any clicking noises?

ok you have a new hardrive and it up and going right?? Heres an old trick worth a try freeze the old one for about a hour make sure its pinned as a slave.Put in and hope it works.If it does get everyting off of it because you only get one shot most of the time with this

Yup put that bad boy in the freezer, pop it out in a few hours and try, if that doesnt work.. only option is Drive Savers or some one like them and they are not local or cheap

www.tlsi.net is in grand prairie and do good work. $400-$1000 if the drive is damaged. if its making noises you will probably only make it worse by screwing with it.

Never heard of this before. Sounds intresting. Ive heard that some times you can tap the side of it with the end of a screw driver and it will sit the the head on top of the cylinder. If there not completely dead we take them out and put them in a USB enclosure and do it that way.. If you need to borrow a use enclosure and your local to the DFW area let me know and I can prob let you borrow one. We have them for sata, serial ata, and ide.

I've tried everything and I have a new one, I heard that to take it apart and pulloff the data is very expensive. I should send it back to Western since it is there shit that failed, I know I should have backed it up..'Henry

DO NOT PUT IT IN THE FREEZER YET. PM momostallion, he has some really good software that has pulled a lot of info off bad hard drives before, i don't remember what the name is, but it was like $30 i think.

That depends on if the drive even spins up.

Henry, if you send it in, they most likely will format and restore an OS, not retreive any data.

That's what I'm arfraid of and I already bought two new ones, the first Western came with the PC and the next I bought, so I actually have two that I need to get the info off of...'Henry

ya, if you can't even get it to spin try the freezer trick. put it in a plastic bag first so you don't get any condensation and leave it in there over night. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. its better if you have an extra computer and a external usb hd enclosure. that way right after you take it out of the freezer you can plug it in a computer that is already booted up because you may not have much time.

sometimes you can re-freeze it and try it again if you don't get everything the first time.

the places that you have to send it off to are generally pretty expensive from what i heard. it's not uncommon to pay a couple hundred for the service.

Have you put it in a computer yet to see what it does? Plug it in as a slave into your computer to see if it spins. If it spins and shows up in your drive list, but wont read, its most likely the file structure. This problem can 90% of the time be solved by software. The publisher is OnTrack and it works quite well. All file NAMES will be lost, but the files themselves will be extracted. You can tell the program exactly what file extension to back up. If you want *.jpg or *.jpeg, it will back up every single file of that type it can find, including every junk one in your temp, just because it cant tell the difference.

If it spins up, but does not show up in your drive list, it is most likely hardware (or you might not have it pinned right). If it does this, try the freezer trick. It will work MAYBE 20% of the time, if you're lucky.

If it doesn't spin at all, you'll have to send it in to get rebuilt. It isn't cheap just because most places will do the entire process in a clean room, remove the platters, and install them in a new chassis. And like any data backup, there is no guarantee that all your data will be recovered.

Next time, invest in an external HDD. You can set it up to auto-backup on a regular basis so if this ever happens again, the losses are minimal. You can get a secondary internal instead of external, it is cheaper, but there are tons of uses for a nice external.

Oh and quit buying Western Digital. Buy a Seagate or Hitachi instead, maybe a Samsung if you can find a decent deal. It will last MUCH longer. Stay away from WD and Maxtor