recovery - How to get data from a burnt hard disk drive?

06
2014-04
  • Camil Staps

    I have a 320GB HDD which was in a building that burnt down. I need to get as much information as possible from this drive. It probably won't succeed, but it's worth trying.

    I tried soldering a new connector on it and connecting it to an old PC, but I couldn't find the disk in the hardware manager of Windows XP. This suggests the interface to the motherboard is broke (as might the data itself).

    What's my best bet to get any useful information from the drive?

    • Answers
  • David Schwartz

    Call a professional data recovery company and follow their instructions exactly. The more you mess with it, the more likely it becomes that you will damage any remaining data. This is not something an amateur can do.

    Also, check with your insurance company to see if the data recovery will be covered.

  • techie007

    With that kind of damage, your best bet is probably to send it to a data recovery specialist.

    Here's one in Canada (there's tons of these businesses out there, do a web search for someone more local to you).

    At Data Recovery Canada, physical hard drive problems make up more than 75% of the cases we see, so we know what it takes to get your data back from a physically damaged hard disk.

    Many/Most recovery places will diagnose and determine if they can succeed before starting. And if they get nothing, then they don't charge you.

    An example of such a guaranty/claim, from the same place I linked above:

    enter image description here

    Note: I don't work for the above linked company, and have never used them specifically. :)


    • Related Question

    How to recover data from old drives of different types?
  • Paul Sasik

    I have a short stack of hard drives (4 or 5) that I have been pulling from my old and broken machines over the past number of years with the notion that at some point in the future I will somehow connect them into a new machine to get the data. And I guess the time is now.

    My question is, what's the best way to go about this?

    Note that the drives are of different types: SATA, EIDE desktop and laptop.

    Is there a good, single hardware/software solution that I could use to connect these drives one by one and recover the data? (These drives were all working when used last but I know that they may not spin up. Still, I hope that at least a few will.)


    • Related Answers
  • Doltknuckle

    I prefer using one of these to get a hard drive connected to my computer. If the drive spins, you can generally use windows to read the data off of it. I know windows will read most anything that isn't corrupted. If the data is corrupted your only real choice is Spinrite.

    That will cover most any spinning drive. If the drive doesn't spin or the the head is bad, there is no easy way to recover the data. If it ever gets that far, I usually give up. I don't want to have to spend hundreds of dollars for a specialist to open up the drive and use special equipment to read the platters.

    Hope that helps

  • sammyg

    GetDataBack is the best data recovery program out there. It costs a few dollars. It's about 70 I believe for just the NTFS version, and 120 for both FAT and NTFS. But it's well worth the money in my opinion. I use an external hard drive enclosure to connect any hard drive for data recovery. There are ones that support both SATA and IDE. Here is one from Newegg. In case you are looking for a free software solution then here is a good site that has about 10 options. Good luck!