Hard Drive Help

[MrMaddness]

My friend's power supply just burnt out the other day, and was overheating and shutting down on itself. I told him that he should buy a new one, and that I'd install it for him when I saw him next. He got the power supply today and hooked it up, successfully, I think. It turned on and sounding like it was booting, but nothing came on the monitor. I told him that it could have been the hard drive. He got someone else to take a look at the hard drive, and now he says it's totally fried.

Needless to say, he doesn't have a backup of it.

Now a few questions:

1) What could have caused this?
2) Can he get the data back?
3) What's the best option to fix this?


Thanks.

[m6oo]

I'm going to make a big assumption here and assume that whoever declared the hard drive "fried" really knows what he is doing and the HD has indeed experienced some level of hardware failure.

To answer your questions in this context...

1. Any number of things could have caused this. The faulty power supply, the overheating of the system. As a complex mechanical device with moving parts, ALL hard drives will eventually fail, it's just a matter of when.

2. You can always get at least SOME of the data back. It just depends how much time and money you're willing to spend on the problem. First of all, DONT DO ANYTHING THAT WILL CAUSE DATA TO BE WRITTEN TO THE DRIVE. This includes letting windows try to "fix" the drive with scandisk, defragging etc. That said, if the drive mechanics are mostly working (i.e. the drive will still spin up and the heads are still in place and will track) then you can hook the drive up as a slave data drive in a working system and use any number of data recovery programs to try to pull data off of the drive. If you're a real cheapass, you can try PC file inspector at:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

This is a freeware recovery program. Install this on the working system and then try installing the bad drive as a slave data drive on that system. Best results are achieved by hooking the drive directly to the IDE cable inside the system. I don't recommend using a USB interface for data recovery.

If the drive mechanics are compromised (i.e. the drive won't spin up or the heads are locked or won't track at all) then the drive will have to be sent to a lab that specializes in HD recovery. This isn't cheap and you aren't guaranteed to get anything back. They just pull off what they can.


3. If it's just the HD that's bad now??? Get a new HD and reinstall the OS.