Unreadable damaged SATA laptop Drive, looking for recovery.

[Xaimill]

Hi. I've been looking around the internet for a solution to this problem, and hope to find some sort of resolution here.

I have two SATA laptop hard drives that got damaged on separate laptops, but they share the same problem.

Here's what happened on the most recent, on a Compaq 610:
(The drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.2)
I was using photoshop, and I dragged a picture to the project I was working on, but the computer started to respond really really slow until the mouse moved but the computer was cold frozen. The laptop had about 3GB of free space, and Im assuming the temporary files of photoshop maxed the drive, prolly leaving less than 100MB of free space.
So the laptop froze, and I decided to force shutdown it, but as soon as I pressed the power button, it instantly turned off, not after a couple of seconds, like a regular forced shutdown.
I powered it on, started working again, dragged another file, and the same thing happened: mouse moved but system froze, pressing the power button shut it down instantly. When I turned it on for the second time, however, it never loaded again. It stayed at the blinking underscore.

I tried reading the drive externally, but no matter how, the computer would recognize the drive, but immediatly ask to format it. It showed no drive space, or if it was NTSF or FAT. My Computer stayed like loading/reading, but always the format question. When I gave up and told it to format, it said it couldn't. The disk, in all case, its unreadable and unbootable.

I recently tried reading it again, but it shows 2 partitions, a 100MB accessible partition (27MB used, but there's nothing inside), and the main partition which won't read (asks for format).

Will PCB replacing help me reading the drive? There is no ticks, jumps, scratches or any other type of noise from the drive. It just stopped working out of nowhere.

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post.

[pcimage]

PCB will not help you at all on this one.

Sounds like it have media issues or something more serious.

If you don't value your data too much and happy to take the risks of DIY then you can try to clone the drive to another good drive, using a NON WINDOWS cloning software such as "dd_rescue" or "media tools pro" then try and extract the data from the clone.

You may have to use other software such as "getdataback" or "rstudio" to get the data off the clone.

If the imaging does not work, or is really struggling, or drive starts making noises, then STOP immediately and seek pro assistance.

[northwind]

Couldn't agree more.

[Xaimill]

On both drives a value the date pretty much... college arts and other important files... Don't know if I'll risk doing a DIY that I've never ever done before. I tried using GetDataBack on another windows computer but when it was analyzing the system, the program froze, and it only unfroze when I unplugged the drive (using an external SATA to USB reading device)

Which professional am I to seek?

[Alexii]

U need a data recovery company with access to a good hardware imaging suite probably. Looks like shit ton of bads corrupting MFT. This might not even be crazy expensive job.

[Xaimill]

Ok... I might've not understood half of what you said but ok. I'm from Puerto Rico, I don't really know where to look but I'll ask around.

Any names of multinational companies that do that? (like CompUSA for example?)

[Thanks to everyone that has helped, btw!]

[harddrivespecialist]

If you don't mind shipping your drive to continental US, a lot of people from this forum will be able to assist for much less money than multinational company.

[Xaimill]

Thanks for your reply.
I don't really mind shipping it to the US, but who can I trust for the job? I'm new here.

[balemo]

Did you try check disk ??
I have had similar problems many times on customer drives and check disk has solved it 7 out of 10 times
Start there. you have nothing to lose

[dick]

Did you try check disk ??
I have had similar problems many times on customer drives and check disk has solved it 7 out of 10 times
Start there. you have nothing to lose

WRONG WRONG WRONG
You can lose everything important to you if you follow this advice!

In a case like this chkdsk might fix a bad sector or a corrupt file system or it is just as likely to ruin it. That would be the same as paying poker with your data!

If you don't know how to handle even a simple software recovery then you must pass this on as it either already is a specialist hardware recovery job or soon will be if you mess with it.

[pcimage]

Did you try check disk ??
I have had similar problems many times on customer drives and check disk has solved it 7 out of 10 times
Start there. you have nothing to lose

NO! NO! NO!

DO NOT run chkdsk

[unknown]

Running chkdsk will make things worse.

[northwind]

Did you try check disk ??
I have had similar problems many times on customer drives and check disk has solved it 7 out of 10 times
Start there. you have nothing to lose

[Xaimill]

Did you try check disk ??
I have had similar problems many times on customer drives and check disk has solved it 7 out of 10 times
Start there. you have nothing to lose

WRONG WRONG WRONG
You can lose everything important to you if you follow this advice!

In a case like this chkdsk might fix a bad sector or a corrupt file system or it is just as likely to ruin it. That would be the same as paying poker with your data!

If you don't know how to handle even a simple software recovery then you must pass this on as it either already is a specialist hardware recovery job or soon will be if you mess with it.

I CAN'T run chkdisk anyway xD The disk is recognized externally (read as external, like a pendrive), and my current computer (with a new drive) will read the damaged drive but won't open it, double-clicking it will only stay on loading, and nothing. If I unplug the external drive from the USB port, it will prompt me the "Disk needs to me formatted" message.