HELP me transferring all my data from my laptop hard disk to another place?

Question

As I said in a previous question, my laptop has gone bust and I dont know why. After receiving advice from people in yahoo answers, I got an enclosure and put the laptop hard disk in there without any problems. The problem now is the following: When I connect the enclosure with the HD to the computer, the computer recognizes the new usb hardware but as soon as I want to start getting the data out, the hard disk is all hung up and does not work anymore. So..
1. Does this mean that the hard disk is faulty?
2. Are there any applications to help one with this?
3. What can I do now??????

All your help is kindly appreciated
D

Answer 1

In your previous quesiton you said it made a loud noise. That usually means HD failure. HDs are the one thing on a computer besides the fan which will cause noise like that.

As for the enclosure you have to use that on another computer. One of two things is happening. The fan on your CPU has croaked or your HD has croaked. If you are usinga Toshiba the fans on them are notorious about dieing and the replacement cost insane. If the HD in the USB drive fails on another system your HD is likely hosed. There are possibilities to recover your data. Spinwrite is one. You may be able to use Spinwrite to repair enough software damage to retrieve the data or even get round enough errors on a dieing HD to retrieve your data.

If that fails you will need to decide is it worth $1,000 USD to send it to a retrieval specialist who will attempt to remove the platter from the HD and read it directly. Most people do not have data that is valuable enough to do this. It also assumes that the problem is not a head crash which can damage the platters beyond recovery without some sophisiticated and expensive tools.

So try these things in this order.
Atach the HD to another computer and attempt to read the data. (If this works then you likely need a new CPU fan not HD)

Run spinwrite on the HD and attempt to retrieve the data. Replace HD and use copy data back to HD.

If the data is valuable enough send HD into data recovery service. Expensive option and still not guarenteed to retrieve the data. Depends on damage to the HD platter surface.

Answer 2

Most likely the drive is bad. You can try some third party software that loads its own partition information in order to extract the data. However i dont think you are going to have any luck if it freezes as soon as you access it. One program i have used in the past for drives that still kinda work is ERD commander. But if the drive is locking up as sson as you access i think you may not have any luck retrieving any data. There are also some places you can send the drive to who will do data recovery but they do not guarantee it and they are usually quite expensive. If there is nothing on there that cant be recreated or lived without would simply suggest buying a new drive and starting over. Hope this helps

Answer 3

Most likely an issue with the hard drive going bad. Hopefully it will only part of the drive that is the problem. Suggest you try move just a couple of files at a time rather than a big chunk and see if that makes a difference. Also try copy from a different part of the drive.

Best guess I have at the moment...good luck.

Answer 4

I think that if the usb is recognized by your computer, and it doesnt read any info from the hard drive, probably that was the problem in the beginning. It might be damaged

Answer 5

If you placed it in the usb device and it didn't work. The drive is definitely failed and will require specialized data recovery. Contact me off-list for info.

Answer 6

Your harddisk is probably bad, but I would like to know more about exactly what error you receive....